


Stars, Rain, Sun, Moon

by adiva_calandia



Series: Stars, Rain, Sun, Moon [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Complete, Crossover, F/M, Gen, I Blame Tumblr, M/M, Nightmare Fuel, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-22
Updated: 2014-06-30
Packaged: 2018-01-20 09:54:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 39,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1506209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adiva_calandia/pseuds/adiva_calandia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Avengers weren't the only super-powered humans caught in the Battle of New York. Three dozen human wizards were on the ground fighting as well.</p>
<p>And as S.H.I.E.L.D. rethinks humanity's place in the Universe, Nick Fury calls on one New York wizard to help them figure out what the hell just happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Out-of-town Business

**Author's Note:**

> As a quick side note, I'm using Peter Murray's old timeline for the books rather than the NME, which puts Nita's birthdate at April [mumblesomething], 1990. That puts her and Kit in the 22-23 age range for this story.
> 
> The title comes from E. E. Cummings' "anyone lived in a pretty how town."

The cats were the first to know.

Minutes before the sky opened up and the Chitauri came pouring down on New York City like acid rain, the hyperstring structures in the Grand Central complex started to go haywire. Frantic calls went out to Seniors and Advisories – which meant New York was filling up with wizards moments before it was filling up with aliens.

The Powers work this way sometimes.

Dairine asks Tom, during a break in the clean-up efforts that followed, whether the Chitauri invasion might have been some kid's Ordeal. Tom – looking tired, as he does more and more these days – shakes his head. “It could've been. I know there were more than a few new wizards in the battle. They probably turned the tide.”

 _Some of them probably gave their lives_ goes unspoken. Dairine knows plenty well the kind of sacrifices wizards make.

“What I want to know,” Dairine says, rolling her eyes, “is why the Hulk and Iron Man and _Thor_ are getting idolized, and _we're_ still in the closet? How does a world stay _sevarfrith_ after a freaking alien invasion?”

From the sink, Carl snorts. “People have been expecting an alien invasion for generations. Completely respectable scientists say that there's probably intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. There's a lot of wizardry that'd be harder for most people to swallow.”

Tom gives her a wry smile. “Anyway, you might find some sectors of the US are less _sevarfrith_ than you think.”

 

* * *

 

“Strategic Homeland . . . uh, Enforcement . . .” Nita snaps her fingers, trying to remember. “I before E except after--”

“Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, Logistics Division,” Kit tells her, his grin shimmering in the “screen” hovering over her manual.

“How do you remember this stuff?”

“Magic.”

“You twerp.”

“You can remember an entire spell circle and you can't remember an initialism? Some Advisory.”

Nita makes a face at him. “Yeah, well, Bobo helps with the spell circles.”

“You'd better get it down before you meet people there.”

“I'm just consulting,” she says. “I'll probably be meeting some mid-level guy or other. It's not like they're gonna quiz me.” A beat. “Right?”

Kit raises his eyebrows. Nita groans.

“Strategic Homeland Intelligence--”

“Intervention.”

“--Intervention, Enforcement, Logistics Division.”

Kit grins. “You'll be fine, Neets, don't worry about it.”

She sighs and gives him a grin back. “Thanks. How's Boston?”

“Wicked pissah.”

Nita cracks up. “You've got the lingo down!”

Kit laughs. “It's what I do best. It's great, really. Nightmare to drive around, though. Almost makes you miss New York traffic.”

“Oh, my _god_ ,” Nita says. “I didn't think it was possible!”

“There are more things in heaven and Massachusetts, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

 

* * *

 

When Nita walks into the Triskelion in DC, she's met by a very serious-looking young man in a suit, who introduces himself as one Agent Simpson. He hands her a visitor badge and leads her to an elevator. Nita tries to make small talk about the view of the Potomac; Simpson smiles and nods but doesn't really engage.

He invites her to have a seat in one of the minimalist leather chairs in the waiting room, gets her a bottle of water, and then – just kind of leaves her there. People come and go through the waiting room, some in suits and some in uniforms, and time ticks by. Nita starts to get nervous, and then starts to get annoyed.

Forty minutes after she sat down, she's mostly just bored. But she's got a really good rack in Words With Friends--

“Juanita Callahan?”

Her head jerks up and she turns off the phone. “Yes? Nita, it's Nita. Yes?”

The woman smiles politely. “Director Fury will see you now. It's this way.”

“Director--?” Nita starts to say, but the director's assistant is already striding away towards the hallway, and Nita has to hurry to keep up.

The assistant knocks on a glass door, waits for a muffled “Yes,” and opens the door. Nita hovers uncertainly.

“Director Fury? It's Juanita Callahan.”

“Nita,” Nita mutters, but thankfully nobody hears her under Director Fury telling his assistant to send her in.

Nita notes a couple things about the office as she enters: the monitors on one wall, the floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls, the view of Washington DC, the faint hum of a lot of electronics working quietly. The three men by the desk take up most of her attention, though. Standing behind the desk must be Director Fury, in the eyepatch and trench coat; rising from his chair is a clean-cut, broad-shouldered man a little older than her; and lounging beside him is a dark-haired, bearded man that she suddenly recognizes with a rush of nerves.

Director Fury steps out from his desk and comes towards her, hand extended. “Ms. Callahan. I'm Nick Fury, Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. Thank you for coming in.”

“I – thank you for having me, sir.” She shakes his hand, firmly, she thinks, making herself stand a little straighter. He's the kind of person you watch your posture around.

“This,” Fury says, turning to the other men, “is Captain Steve Rogers.” Rogers gives her a businesslike nod and another firm handshake. “And this is Tony Stark.”

“Hi.” Stark gives her a wave with two fingers and a grin that reminds her of Dairine.

“Nice to meet you,” Nita manages. Dairine is going to flip out when she finds out Nita met _Tony Stark_. The name Steve Rogers rings a bell, too, but she can't quite place it yet.

Fury gestures for her to take a chair beside Rogers. (She notices that Rogers waits until she's seated to take his own chair.) “How was the trip in from New York?”

“Uh – fine, very comfortable,” she says, with a sidelong glance at the two men on her side of the desk. Carl had told her she'd be meeting with someone at S.H.I.E.L.D. to discuss the Battle of New York, acting on the Powers' service and in her Advisory capacity. So Fury presumably knows she's a wizard, maybe even knows that she gated in from New York – but these guys?

“I'm sorry to have kept you waiting. We've been having some . . .” Fury's visible eye flicks over to Rogers. “Spirited discussions. Did your Senior brief you on why we're bringing you in?”

“Not really, sir. He said it was related to the Battle of New York, but he wasn't more specific than that.”

“Were you in the battle?” Rogers asks.

When Fury sees her hesitating, he nods for her to continue. “Go ahead. The Captain is cleared to know about this kind of thing. Wouldn't be here otherwise.”

“And I'll find out anyway,” Stark says, sitting up straighter. He's looking at her with more interest now. “You were in New York? What are you, like a cop? EMT? City planner?”

“No, I'm a wizard.”

There's a beat of bewildered silence. Nita feels her cheeks getting a little warm.

“I was one of three dozen human wizards that were involved in the battle,” she continues, before anyone else can break the silence. Her left hand lifts to her right upper-arm, an unconscious gesture, touches the scar under her sleeve before falling back to her lap. “Uh, I was part of a group holding the line around Rockefeller Center. We've been assisting with the clean-up effort to make everything go a little more smoothly and safely, and we've been doing our best to get as much Chitauri tech as we can off-world--”

“Back up back up back up,” Stark interrupts. “ _Human_ wizards? As in – there are other wizards that are _not_ human?”

Nita blows out a breath, nods, and starts in on the explanations. Fury lets Stark quiz her for a few minutes – lets her prove her powers by producing a small wizard-light over her palm – until finally stepping in.

“The point is, as lower Manhattan's Advisory, the battle fell in Ms. Callahan's jurisdiction. More to the point, she's got combat experience with other aliens.” He fixes her with a one-eyed stare. “Don't you?”

“Most of my experience with aliens is _not_ combat. Wizards try to avoid--”

“ _Do_ you have combat experience with aliens, Ms. Callahan, yes or no?”

“. . . Yeah. But I'm not a soldier, I'm not – a tactician, or anything, if that's what you're looking for. What _are_ you looking for?”

“Experts,” Fury says, leaning back in his chair. “And you and your colleagues, Ms. Callahan, are the only experts on how the Chitauri, their tactics, their technologies stack up to other species that Earth's got right now.”

“So you want me to . . .?”

“Lend us your knowledge.”

“Technical term's 'consultant,'” Stark puts in. “Means the IRS takes a big chunk out of your 1099 come April and you don't get to make any actual decisions.” He grins. “Barring extraordinary circumstances.”

Rogers half-smiles. “His favorite kind.”

“For how long?” Nita asks Fury, blinking.

“Long as you want,” he replies. “Or as long as we need you. Whichever comes first.”

Which is how, Nita explains to Dairine that evening, from a DC hotel room, she ended up as the first official wizard on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s payroll.


	2. Water-Cooler Gossip

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really could not explain to you why I'm so invested in the stupid day-to-day bureaucracy and annoyances of working at a giant company, except that I've worked at enough well-funded high-security sites to know that some things are constant, and one is that food from a cafeteria always sucks.

“I'll walk you down to the lobby,” Rogers offers as this first meeting comes to an end. “You can get lost pretty easy in here.”

“Seriously, you, me, recoilless blasters,” Stark calls after them. “We'll talk.”

“Uh-huh,” Nita says with a non-committal smile and a wave over her shoulder. She tries not to sigh with relief when they're out in the hallway, conscious of Rogers beside her.

“How're you doing?” he asks, casual and friendly.

“I'm – okay.” She glances up at him, and catches another of those half-smiles on his face. “I feel like I got a little blindsided.”

“Yeah, I could tell.” Nita stifles a groan, and Rogers chuckles. “Don't worry about it. It wasn't your fault. Fury and Stark together are enough to put anyone off balance. You rolled with the punches. That's all anyone can ask.”

Nita snorts. “I'm pretty sure people can ask you to punch back.”

Rogers looks thoughtful at that, as they reach the elevator. “Yeah, well.”

Nita waits for him to continue, but after a second or two decides he's probably not going to. The elevator arrives in the pause, and Rogers gestures for her to precede him into it.

As the car starts its descent, he speaks again. “So you've been in combat before New York.”

“Yeah?”

“You don't seem like a typical fighter.”

“I – try not to be.” She stuffs her hands in her pockets and shrugs her shoulders, a little defensive. “Wizards are supposed to protect life, not take it, not if we can help it. When it gets to the point where your only option is to fight, to shoot to kill – it's a loss, every time.”

Rogers gives her a closer look. “How many fights _have_ you been in?”

Nita gives him a faint, rueful smile. “Too many.”

Rogers mirrors the smile. “Good answer.”

Nita's not so sure about that, but her smile widens a little anyway.

In the lobby, Rogers hands her off to a receptionist with instructions to get a cab to the hotel, but not before offering her another handshake. “Looking forward to working with you, Miss Callahan.”

“Nita's fine. Thanks, Captain. So'm I.”

“Steve's fine.” He gives her an all-American grin. “See you around.”

As he ambles off in another direction, Nita turns to the receptionist and leans in. “Look, I didn't want to ask him because I thought it'd get weird, but – did I just share an elevator with _Captain America?_ ”

“What, you didn't know?”

Nita can feel her cheeks going hot with a blush. “Oh, my _god_. You wouldn't believe how weird my day has been.”

The receptionist looks wry. “I hear that a lot.”

 

***

 

“I'm not the right wizard for this job.”

It's been two weeks since she met with Fury. Most of the first was spent twiddling her thumbs as S.H.I.E.L.D. combed through her background and dealt with the necessary red tape to give her clearance. The second has mainly involved her, labs, techs, several instances of getting trapped on a floor because her badge and the doors won't communicate, and a staggering array of Chitauri technology.

Stark whips off his eye protection and gives her a narrow look – not suspicious or dubious, but incisive. Nita has come to recognize it over the last week: it's the same look he gives the alien technology when he's trying to make it give up its secrets. “Why not?”

Nita gestures at the guns laying on the table, in various stages of dis-assembly. “Talking to these is like trying to have a conversation with someone through two iterations of Babelfish translation. I'm not _good_ at machines. I thought they might have enough biological components that I could get a handle on it, but--” She throws up her hands, frustrated. “I'm the wrong wizard for this job.”

“Callahan, you got as much out of these in two days as S.H.I.E.L.D.'s people did in two weeks.” He points at her with his glasses. “A defeatist attitude is a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“Look, I'm sorry. You'd be a lot better off with my sister, or my partner.”

“Sooo can you get _them_ here? 'Cause if not, I mean, you know what they say, you work with what you have, not what you wish you had.”

Nita's privately pretty sure that the only people who say stuff like that are trying to pass the buck, and that idea makes her grumpier than ever. “I'm getting lunch,” she grumbles. “I'll make some calls.”

The Triskelion's cafeteria is surprisingly lousy, given how much money S.H.I.E.L.D. obviously has. Nita grabs a sad-looking sandwich and heads outside to eat in the sun. It's muggy as hell, but she figures she can stand it for a few minutes.

Neither Dairine nor Kit pick up when she calls. Dairine was a long shot anyway, given that she's off-planet at the moment. Nita feels a little pang of nostalgia after she hangs up on Kit's voicemail, though. They've never been as close as they were in high school, since he went off to MIT and she stayed close to home at NYU. But Kit's always been able to get her head back in the game when she starts to get stuck.

“This seat taken?”

Nita looks up, squinting in the sun, and Steve Rogers grins down at her.

“Hey, no, go right ahead.” She pats the bench beside her. “How're you?”

“Not too busy for a sit-down lunch, for once.”

“They must work you pretty hard.”

“Not as hard as basic training,” he muses. “But pretty hard.”

Nita laughs. “Is anything as hard as basic training? Seriously. I've never done anything like it.”

Steve shakes his head. “The thing about training is that it's not _like_ anything else. It's not real life. You don't drop and give anybody twenty in the trenches. That's not the point.”

“So what is the point?”

“Making you into a soldier. Making you and your buddies into a unit. That's the point.” He gives her a curious look. “You didn't have to do any training to do what you do?”

“Not exactly, not anything formalized like the military, or those guys.” She jerks a thumb over her shoulder at the building behind them. “We had some guidance from older wizards, and we had our manuals, but most of the wizards I know were pretty much, you know, self-motivated. I guess our Ordeals are like our basic training.”

“Your Ordeal,” Steve echoes.

Nita blows out a breath. “Wizards get presented with the Oath because there's some problem that they're needed to solve – _that_ wizard, that kid, specifically. That kid has something unique that makes them perfect for solving the problem. And generally speaking, solving that problem is their Ordeal. Usually the – uh, the Lone One, It makes an appearance to try and make sure the wizard fails.”

She gave Stark and Steve an explanation of the Powers in that first meeting, but it was abbreviated, to say the least. So she's already trying to figure out in her head the best way to explain the Lone Power – probably use the Lucifer story, Steve seems like he'd already be familiar with that one – when Steve asks, “What was yours?”

Nita blinks. “Sorry?”

“What was your Ordeal? Or – are you not supposed to ask? Is it private?”

She blinks again. “Oh, uh, kind of. Depends on the wizard.” She pauses; Steve watches her, patient. “Why do you ask?”

“Just curious, I guess.”

Maybe so, but she wonders. But she says: “I went to another New York.”

Even the Cliff's notes version takes a little while; there's so much context. She skims over the helicopters and pertyons, the Eldest with its hoard of junk, the Mason's Word. She skips over Fred and the Lotus almost entirely, not sure how to explain to Captain America that she was friends with a white hole and a car.

Somehow those absences are obvious in her story, though. When she finishes, after taking a moment to digest, Steve looks down at his hands.

“You lost someone out there,” he says, very quiet, very solemn, incongruous on such a golden, humid day. “Didn't you?”

“I've lost a lot of someones.” It occurs to her, totally coincidentally except not really at all, that she ought to get back to the lab, that this lunch break has run pretty long, that she's dying for some air conditioning.

She stands up, collecting her things, and adds as an afterthought, “Like I said. I've been in too many fights.”

Steve looks up at her, and she doesn't really want to deal with the look in his eyes: too blue and too understanding and too piercing, considering. Too much like Ronan's, when he was holding the Spear.

“Hey, thanks for lunch,” she says, managing a smile, and retreats back to work.

Against her expectations, the work goes better that afternoon.


	3. Cautionary Procedures

It's been a month and a half, and Stark has gone back to California to deal with various company issues, and Nita has settled into something of a commute: three days in DC, four in New York. A wizard a couple years older than her, Aisha, has been promoted to Advisory to help cover for her, which is a relief -- she was starting to feel guilty about neglecting her proteges.

Fury has her working less in the labs and more in conference rooms, which suits her. Well, not Fury himself -- Nita's apparently been passed off to his second in command, a woman named Hill with a hidden sarcastic streak. Nita likes her, even though they mostly only see each other when Hill drops in to listen to the discussions or to get progress reports from her analysts.

Said analysts have mainly been quizzing Nita on alien societies. They've spent a lot of time on the Chitauri, of course, going over what footage there is from the battle and what they've gleaned from the tech left behind. These meetings, at least, are mutually beneficial: after a while Nita stopped trying to take notes for updates to the manual and just started leaving it on record. The Chitauri entry can't update fast enough. It bugs her how many blank spots there still are in their knowledge, but it's an improvement over nothing, anyway.

So it's a month and a half before Nita gets to really show off.

They've been joined in conference room 1120 by a young redhead who introduced herself as Nat, with an easy smile that puts Nita at ease immediately. They're going over the end of the Battle again, the moment when the portal closed and the warriors all dropped like discarded puppets.

"It's an Ender's Game kind of scenario, right?" Nita says.

"The enemy's gate is down?" one of the analysts mutters.

"Well yeah, always a good strategy, but I mean -- destroy the mothership and everyone goes down. But if they were to attack us again--"

"That's a pretty big if," another analyst objects. "They only got here in the first place because Loki opened the portal. There's no Loki and no Tesseract now."

"If you think Loki and the Tesseract are the only ingredients required to open a worldgate, you're setting yourself up for some really unpleasant surprises."

“Hope for the best and prepare for the worst,” Nat says.

“Right, yeah.” Nita nods at her. “If the Chitauri attack again, they're likely to protect their mothership better. Plus” – she grins, joking -- “it's not like S.H.I.E.L.D.'s just got nukes on hand. So I'd recommend looking for other ways to sever the neural link. It wouldn't be a battle-ending solution, but it'd be good to have in the arsenal.”

“EMP?” the first analyst starts, when the door to the conference room is yanked open. Nat is on her feet so fast Nita almost doesn't see her move. It's only Steve in the doorway, but the look on his face doesn't inspire confidence.

“Natasha. We've got a developing situation. Sorry, folks,” he says to the rest of the room, as Nat starts for the hallway. “You'll have to table it. They're going to be turning up the alert level any second.”

At that, everyone gets up, starting to gather their things. Nita follows their lead – and then changes her mind and follows Nat into the hallway. She has to jog to catch up.

“Hey – hey, what's going on?”

Steve and Nat both look over their shoulders at her, perfectly synchronized. “You need to go with the others,” Nat says, firm. “They're just going to put the building on lockdown for a few minutes. It's nothing to be worried about.”

“What's going on?” Nita repeats.

Steve frowns. “A ship went down in the North Atlantic.”

“One of ours? And you're going after it?”

“Nita, you need to go and--”

“Fuck that,” she snaps. “Can either of _you_ walk on water?”

They both pause.

“You can walk on water,” Nat says, flat.

“I can do a _lot_ of things.”

“We don't know what the whole story is,” Steve warns. “It could be more dangerous than just a search and rescue.”

“Oh, _whatever_ , you don't know how many times I've nearly died so don't try to scare me off.”

Nat's eyebrows go up. “Can you take orders?”

“Sure, yeah.”

“Done.” Nat turns and strides down the hall without another word, apparently satisfied. Nita gives Steve a _There, see?_ look and jogs after her.

“Can you multiply loaves and fishes, too?” Nat asks up ahead.

“Nah, conservation of mass gets in the way.”

Shaking his head, Steve follows.

 

* * *

 

So it turns out that Nat is actually Natasha Romanov, a name Nita feels she should recognize, and both she and Steve have these really well-designed outfits for going on missions like this, and Nita feels just _slightly_ outclassed in her slacks and button-down. The agent leading the team – his name's Barlow or something, Nita didn't quite catch it – looks dubious about having her along as he shows her how to strap into the jet's jump seat.

Steve strides over as the engines start to cycle up. “Last chance to back out. No harm, no foul.”

Nita sets her jaw. “I am not backing out.”

Steve considers her a moment, then nods. “Right. You follow any orders given to you by any of us, understand?”

Nita blinks. “Yeah. Understood, Captain.”

“Good. Our job is to get everyone home safely. That includes you.”

“I'm here to help, Captain.” She adjusts her harness. “Don't worry about me.”

“Just be careful.”

Nita doesn't say _I always am_. Wizards aren't supposed to lie, after all. But she nods. “I'll try.”

 

* * *

 

Add this to the list of things Nita has done, now: jumped from a plane into _freaking cold_ North Atlantic waters.

She really wishes that she had a snappy uniform that was a smidge more waterproof than slacks and a shirt.

As it turns out, climbing out onto the surface will be the hardest part of the mission in most ways. It's not significantly warmer on top of the water than in it, with the spray, and it's difficult to balance on the deep, slow swells. She's going to be sore tomorrow, assuming she doesn't die of hypothermia first.

But she reaches the floundering vessel, where the Captain helps her up onto the deck. He directs her belowdecks to do whatever she can about stopping the boat from taking on more water. Trying not to shiver too hard, she does as she's told.

She's in the middle of talking a leak closed when an unfamiliar voice rings out behind her. “Put your hands where I can see them and turn around!”

“Hang on a second,” she snaps, not turning. “I'm with S.H.I.E.L.D. _Just a little tighter, there, pulls those atoms in a little closer . . ._ ”

“I will shoot you in five seconds if you're not facing me with your hands in the air!”

Nita sighs. The patch ought to hold for a few minutes, anyway. She raises her hands, mutters a familiar four-word phrase under her breath, and turns around slowly.

The sailor at the other end of the room, blocking the exit, has the hard eyes of a mercenary and the urgent tone of the trapped. He's holding a gun, and Nita breathes a sigh of relief when she sees it's just a normal gunpowder-and-lead kind of weapon. The shield she just activated is only designed to block physical force.

“It's okay,” she tells him. “I'm with S.H.I.E.L.D. We're here to get everyone--”

“Shut _up_. How many of you are there?”

“You're . . . not S.H.I.E.L.D., huh.”

“I said--”

“It's just me down here,” she says quickly. “Look, you've got me right where you want me. I'm not armed.” If she gets him over here, can she get the gun away from him? If it fires, it might ricochet and do who knows what kind of damage to either the ship or to him. Shit, this isn't great. “Why don't you tell me what happened? What is it you're after?”

“I've got what I was after,” he growls, advancing slowly towards her. “And I think you're going to help me get away with it now that I've got it.”

Nita spots the dark blue helmet a moment before a gloved hand taps the gunman on the shoulder. He whirls straight into the Captain's grip – one hand on the gun, one in the gunman's shirtfront.

In the struggle that follows, the predictable happens: the gun goes off. Nita yelps and ducks on instinct, and feels the _ping_ like an itch in a phantom limb when the bullet bounces off her shield. She hears it ricochet again and clatter to a stop someplace, just before the Captain gets the gun out of the gunman's hand. One good punch ends the fight.

“Nita--” He turns towards her, his eyes worried behind the cowl – and then confused, when he sees her standing there unhurt. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I'm fine.” She murmurs a word to release the spell and hurries over to him. “I had a shield up. You?”

“Fine,” he confirms, blinking at her. “Come on. Evac's going to be here in two minutes.”

“What about him?”

The Captain looks down at the gunman, and his expression hardens. “A saboteur. It's a surveillance ship, and he was sending secrets to his employers before he tried to sink the ship. He didn't think out his escape plan, though.” He bends down and hauls the gunman to his feet, pinning his arms behind his back. “So now he's coming home with us.”

Back on the plane, with everyone wrapped in blankets and the sailors making their reports to the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents in hushed tones, it occurs to Nita that maybe _she's_ not supposed to know it was a surveillance ship. Maybe she's not supposed to know that this spy who held her at gunpoint is going back to a secure S.H.I.E.L.D. facility. Maybe this is all way above her pay grade.

 _Not supposed to know_ , she decides, might be the best reason _to_ know something. Forbidden knowledge never struck her as a good long-term strategy.

So she listens to the conversations around her, and wrings out her hair, and tries not to think about the worry in Steve's eyes when he turned to her.


	4. Networking

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, it might be worth noting that I've never seen _Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D._ so if anything I come up with is directly contradicted by that show, then -- you are certainly free to correct me, but I reserve the right to continue making shit up according to my whims. Thanks!

"Don't you have an office or something?"

"Please, I'm a consultant. Half the time I'm lucky anyone remembers I work here." Nita waves to Farhanna as they come up to the reception desk in the lobby. "Hey, Farhanna, this is Christopher Rodriguez. He should be on the visitor list for the day."

"Hi," Kit says, waving.

Farhanna smiles at him as she hands over the visitor badge. "Here you go, Mr. Rodriguez. Welcome to S.H.I.E.L.D."

"This is so cool," Kit whispers to Nita as she leads him towards the elevators. "Do people call you Agent?"

"If somebody called me Agent I would probably have a heart attack. We're independent contractors and I like it that way."

"Agents Rodriguez and Callahan has a nice kind of buddy cop movie ring to it, though."

She punches his shoulder lightly, grinning. "Stop it."

Walking around the Triskelion with Kit in tow makes her see the whole thing with fresh eyes. Fresh eyes are the point of having Kit here, of course; he's finally carved out enough time in his schedule to come out from Boston and take a look at some of the Chitauri jetsam that's still giving the lab techs fits.

Kit looks suitably impressed when they get to the labs, but he becomes all business when Nita introduces him to Dr. Cavalia. And he's downright serious when Cavalia leads them into the lab where they're storing the Chitauri sled.

"This is incredible," he murmurs, walking around it. "Wow. I mean, wow. It flies?"

"It did," Nita confirms. "As far as I can tell it's got a pretty standard anti-grav propulsion system. Not as efficient as you'd see on, like, Rirhath or K'len. The real problem is the interface."

Kit glances at Cavalia for permission, then reaches out to touch the control panel, just running his fingers over it. "It looks biometric."

"That's our best guess," Cavalia agrees. "But without a live Chitauri, we can't make it work."

"But I thought," Nita adds, "that if we could talk to it, convince it to recognize human biometrics ..."

"It's worth a shot." Kit wraps his fingers around the handlebars, awkwardly fitting them into grooves made for very different fingers. " _Dai'stiho, buddy. You awake?_ "

Nita hangs back, eavesdropping. She's gotten a little better at speaking with Chitauri artifacts, but not a lot; their voices in the Speech are still garbled and hard for her to interpret, and they won't listen to her at all. Kit seems to be faring a little better, though she can see it takes him a lot of focus.

It's interesting to watch Cavalia as Kit works. Whenever Nita's talking to some object or other, her whole attention is on the conversation, with none to spare for the reactions of the non-wizards around her. Cavalia looks fascinated, but uncomfortable. Nita wonders if it's just the discomfort of seeing someone else making progress on her project -- and then, with a mild jolt, wonders if it's the wizardry itself Cavalia is uncomfortable with. Is it even possible to work in the same building as the Avengers and be uncomfortable with wizardry?

She pushes the thought aside. There's nothing helpful about making assumptions. Unless Cavalia actually objects, may as well act like there's no problem.

"Okay," Kit says, in the cautious tones of someone carrying an overfilled cup of coffee, "I've at least got it admitting I'm sentient. Let's see if . . . _Run_ ," he says in the Speech.

The sled starts to hum, a low tone that sets everyone's teeth on edge instantly. Nita winces. Lights fade into sight along the control panel, and Kit grins triumphantly.

" _Now_ we're talking. _Now let's_ \-- ow!"

He yanks his hands away from the handlebars with a curse, his palms a stinging red. The sled powers down in half a second.

"You okay?" Nita says, hurrying forward.

"Yeah. It doesn't like me. Ow, shit, is there a sink around?"

Cavalia nods. "In the decontamination room. I'll show you."

As Cavalia leads Kit away to tend to his hands, Nita gives the Chitauri sled a narrow-eyed look. " _That was rude_ ," she mutters in the Speech.

The sled lies there, dead and dumb and brutally graceful, and Nita follows the others.

 

* * *

 

"It could be keyed to an individual," Kit says, as they wait for the coffee machine to finish dispensing Nita's latte. (The coffee machines seem to be the only vending machines in the building that S.H.I.E.L.D. has spent serious money on, because they produce espresso on par with any chain coffee shop. Hill said something once about the support staff threatening to strike over the old machines; Nita is still not sure if that was a joke or not.)

"Did it tell you anything at all?" Nita asks. "The guns pretty much just gave me name, rank, and serial number."

"A little more than that, yeah. It didn't want to recognize me as a person at first -- and once it did, it was _aggressive_." He drums his fingers against his own cup of coffee. "You know, I think maybe it could tell I wanted to look at it without using it. It _wanted_ to be used, but its use is war. It's _itching_ for war."

He goes quiet for a moment. Nita doesn't interrupt. She knows when he's working through something.

"You know what it kind of reminded me of," he says finally, slowly, and looks up to meet her eyes. "The taxis."

". . . Yeah," Nita breathes. "Yeah, I know what you mean."

The taxis -- and everything else -- in the other Manhattan, the dark mirrors of machines and creatures from this world. Nita has a sudden vivid flash of memory: Kit, small and slight and scared but not showing it, whacking the control panel of a hostile elevator with his wand. God, that was a long time ago.

"Think you could bully it into listening?"

Kit shrugs. "Maybe, but I'd rather not. I don't have the power ratings to do the brute-force solutions anymore, yeah? Besides, if I try to bully it, it might just blow up. They seem like the type."

"Those flyers blow up if you look at 'em funny," says a voice behind them. They both turn; an agent with short-cropped hair and a weary face is standing there, considering them.

"I couldn't say," Nita says, blinking at him. "I was doing a lot more than looking at them when I was fighting them."

"You're the wizard, right?"

"Yes?"

He gives them a jerk of his chin. "Clint Barton."

Nita glances at Kit; they don't need telepathy to read _what's going on?_ on each other's faces. "I'm Nita Callahan, and this is Kit Rodriguez."

Kit sticks out a hand. "Hi there."

Barton looks almost hesitant before stuffing his hands in his pockets, refusing the handshake. Kit shrugs and drops his hand

"You guys are working on getting those flyers up and running, huh?"

"The Chitauri sled? Yeah, but we're having trouble with the biometrics." Off Barton's questioning look, Nita clarifies, "They're keyed to Chitauri biology, far as we can tell."

Barton frowns. "There's gotta be an override. Loki was driving one in New York. He's not Chitauri. Trust me."

Nita and Kit exchange another glance. "Really," Kit says. "Loki."

"Yeah, not exactly the one you're thinking of," Nita says. "The Asgardians are definitelypart of the temporal plane of existence -- I'll fill you in."

"An override, huh." Kit nods to Barton. "Thanks, man."

"Get Natasha's report too, if you haven't already," Barton suggests. "She got up close with one. Listen," he adds, turning to Nita, "they ever give you free time around here?"

"Uh -- sometimes, yeah."

Barton nods. "I'll look you up sometime."

"Okay," Nita replies, puzzled.

"Great. Nice to meet you." He gives them another jerky nod and turns to amble off down the hall.

"What the hell was that about?" Kit mutters, just loud enough for Nita to hear.

"Search me," she returns. "Guess I'll find out."

 

* * *

 

But work and then, thankfully, lunch come first. Nita and Kit sit out on what she's come to think of as her bench and catch up.

"How's Ronan?" Nita asks, around a mouthful of tuna sandwich.

"Oh, he's . . . here and there," Kit says, and sighs. "Mostly there."

Nita winces. "Sorry. The long-distance thing? . . ."

"It's rough." Kit crumples up his napkin. "And he's, you know. He's Ronan. You ask him how he's doing and it's all sarcasm unless you catch him in just the right mood." He shrugs. "We said we wouldn't have too many expectations. Leave things flexible. At this point I'm not even sure you can call it 'dating'" -- he does heavily ironic air-quotes -- "anymore."

"Friends with benefits?"

"My It's Complicated on Facebook?"

"You should tell him he's your booty call."

"Yes," Kit deadpans, "that'll most definitely improve our already weird relationship."

Nita snickers. "Sorry."

"What about you, Miss Lonely-Hearts? Seeing anyone?"

"Who has time?"

"Carmela said to tell you her matchmaking services are always at your disposal."

"No. Nuh-uh. Nope. The last person Carmela set me up with I had to report to zeir planetary government for piracy."

Kit grins. "Once-burned, twice-shy, huh?"

"To say the least," she says, rolling her eyes.

(And if she thinks of Steve's congenial smile – Natasha's smirk – well, she's not worries. She and Kit don't overhear each other's thoughts very much anymore. She barely hears that thought herself. She's too busy, and everyone she works with here is way, _way_ out of her league.)

“How're your folks?” Nita asks, more than ready to shift topics, and they settle into the usual gossip and updates. They could be any 20-somethings, Nita thinks -- and she cherishes the small, peaceful normality.


	5. Consulting Fees

It's a couple days later, Friday, when Clint Barton knocks on the open door of Nita's conference room. She's the only one in here, writing up reports for Hill and the manual. Barton's knock catches her mid-yawn.

“Oh – oh, hey,” she manages, not very gracefully. “What's up?”

“Got a few?”

She glances at the reports. “Let me finish this thought, and then yeah, totally.”

Barton wanders around the room as she types, peering out the windows. It's distracting enough that Nita truncates her thoughts on negotiating with inanimate objects and closes down her laptop. “So what's up?”

Barton settles, finally, shoving aside a chair and perching on the edge of the conference table. “This is gonna be weird.”

“Trust me,” Nita says with a smile, “I'm used to weird.”

“Gotta be to work here.” Barton folds his arms, a gesture that strikes Nita as oddly defensive. He's quiet for long enough that Nita starts to get nervous. What is he going to say that takes so much psyching up?

“What do you know about mind control?”

Nita blinks. “Excuse me?”

“Mind control. Magical” – he makes an expressive, tense gesture with one hand next to his temple – “mind-fuckery. You know anything about it?”

“I . . .” She tries to put a name to the sudden knot in her stomach. Alarm? Dread, maybe? “In what context?”

“When Loki first got here, he . . .”

Barton trails off.

Nita waits.

“He took over some of us. Got in our heads. He was there for – a while.” He starts to gesture to his head again, then cuts the motion short and tucks his hand under his arm. “Turned us against S.H.I.E.L.D. He made us do things, used us to get everything he needed to open the portal.”

Nita's face must be a study in shock, because when he looks at her, he frowns and says, “This is news.”

“Yeah," Nita says. Her voice sounds a little strangled to her own ears. "Yeah, this is news. Nobody told me anything like this. I mean, they told me Loki stole the Tesseract and used it to open the portal, and a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent closed it to end the battle. I got the impression everything was very need-to-know, and – they didn't need me to know.”

Barton's eyebrows go up, ironic. “Well, what I  _need_  is someone who understands magic. So now you know.”

She shakes her head. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. Was it – was it a spell, or what? Did he say anything before he got into your head?”

“He had this spear, this scepter thing.” Barton puts his hand over his breastbone. “All he said was 'You have heart.'”

“'You have heart.'” Nita takes a deep breath, lets it out. “So he was looking for – okay, no, first, what is it you're hoping I can tell you?”

His voice is low and flat when he speaks. “How to keep it from ever happening again.”

Nita looks up at him. Meeting his eyes is startling. His focus is laser-beam intense.

“Can you?” he asks.

“I . . . I don't know. I'm sorry.” She sighs. “You have to understand, mind control is _extremely_  difficult. There aren't many entities I've come across that can manage to take over a sentient being's will, even partially, for very long. Really just One.” She glances down at her hands. “And usually that One prefers influence over control. It's much easier to convince someone to do things they wouldn't normally do, to give into desires they'd normally repress. You don't even need superhuman power to do that sometimes.”

She looks back up at Barton. His focus is still sharp, but his expression seems carefully blank. “That said, it's not  _impossible_  to play puppeteer. It's just very, very,  _very_  difficult, and it requires just an unbelievable amount of power. Loki could be capable of it, I don't know – especially if he had some kind of artifact designed to make it easier. But without being able to see this scepter thing, there's not much I can tell you.”

“But will other people be able to do that kind of thing? Would a wizard?”

“ _No_ ,” Nita says, with more force than she intended to use. “No  _way_. It'd be incredibly taxing and it'd be in direct contravention of the Oath. No wizard could do that to you. God, no.”

Her fervor seems to get through to him – at least, she thinks his shoulders relax a fraction. “That's something.”

She takes another deep breath to calm herself down. “Yeah, it's something. It's – I know it's not enough. I know there are some exercises you can do to build up your mental shields, help you keep your self centered – I could find out more about that for you if you want.”

Barton nods. “Yeah, I want.”

“Okay. Okay, I'll find out what I can. Here.” She reaches for her back and rummages for a notebook, writes down her phone number and email, and tears out the page for Barton. “I'm in New York until Wednesday, but you can reach me there if you need to before I get back here. I'll bring some stuff back with me.”

Barton takes the page, folds it up, and tucks it away into an inside pocket. “Great.” He stands up, rolls his neck. “I'll owe you one.”

Nita shakes her head. “Don't be silly.” She starts to gather her things up. “You won't owe me anything.”

“Hey.” He touches her shoulder lightly and she looks up, surprised. “I will. Favors are a serious thing in our line of work.”

“. . . Yeah,” Nita says after a moment, quietly. “In mine too.”

Barton nods, apparently satisfied that they're on the same page – which Nita isn't sure about, but whatever – and turns to leave. Before he reaches the door, though, he pauses.

“Hey, I'd appreciate it if nobody else knew about this.”

Nita nods and gives him a quick smile. “Sure, of course.”

When he returns the smile, he looks like a different person: impish, younger, friendlier.

“Then I'll owe you two,” he says, and disappears into the hall.


	6. Out of Office

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a note that this chapter discusses parental death.

Nita has this daydream where one day, she runs into Chao and asks him, _Okay, here's a mystery of the universe for you: how does anyone afford to live in Manhattan?_

When she first moved to the city, six months after college, she shared a studio for month with a girl she found on Craigslist, who was quiet and polite but left a week's worth of dishes in the sink all the time and kept the heat at 60F no matter what the weather was like. As soon as she could, Nita moved into a one-bedroom in the East Village with a friend from college, Travis. Travis might play his music pretty loud and forget whose turn it was to take out the trash, but they each had their own room – they'd converted the living room area to a bedroom of sorts – and he wasn't overly concerned with Nita's odd schedule.

Even this apartment is technically a little beyond her means, or was when she moved in. The paycheck from S.H.I.E.L.D. more than covers it now, though. And Nita knows that it's not a permanent thing, it's not even a sure thing, Fury could decide he's done with her services tomorrow – but she can't help thinking about moving into a bigger place, maybe. Maybe soon.

In the meantime, when she needs to meet wizards to deal with spelling problems, she tries to do it out of the apartment. Her official office hours, listed in the manual, put her at a coffeeshop near the 9/11 memorial during the day, where she multitasks by working on freelance translation jobs. The coffee doesn't buy itself, after all.

She's in the middle of one of these translations, for a start-up that needs a bunch of marketing material translated into Japanese, when he phone rings.

"Hi, this is Nita."

"Nita?"

She straightens up in her seat, blinking. "Hi, yes."

"This is Steve. Rogers."

"I figured, I don't know any other Steves. What's up?"

He chuckles, the sound gusting through the earpiece. "Are you in New York?"

"Yeah -- is something happening?"

"No, not this time." He pauses. "I'm just in the area, and I -- don't really know anyone else around here anymore."

"--Oh. Oh, right." She flounders for the appropriate response for a second. What do you say to a guy whose friends all died years ago? What she comes up with, finally, is "Do you want to get coffee or something?"

"Yeah," Steve says. Nita hears just a hint of relief in his voice. "Yeah, I'd like that."

"Sure. Where are you? I'm down at the south end of the island."

"I'm in Brooklyn. Holy Cross Cemetery."

Nita thinks for a moment. "Yeah, okay, it'll take me about forty minutes on the train. Meet you at the front gate?"

"Yeah. Take your time."

She tries not to take too much of it.

 

* * *

 

It's raining by the time Nita gets to the cemetery, and she can't spot Steve right away. She steps through the gates, glancing around, and is about ready to call him when he emerges from under one of the large trees.

Nita grins and waves for him to join her under her umbrella. "Geez, come in, let's get somewhere dry."

"Let's." He takes off his baseball cap -- a concession to anonymity, Nita supposes -- and wipes a hand over his wet face. "I was _not_ expecting this."

"Lucky you, a wizard is always prepared."

"Yeah, I think I read that somewhere once." He grins at her.

"Do you know anyplace you want to go? I don't get down here that often."

His smile turns wry. "Oh, no, it's, uh, changed some since I lived here."

"Right. Well, it's Brooklyn, if we wander far enough I'm sure we'll hit someplace good."

"Lead the way."

Nita takes them north and west, towards Flatbush and the park, holding her umbrella up a little higher than normal so that Steve doesn't have to slouch to fit under it. "You took the train?" he wonders as they walk. "Couldn't you just zap over here?"

"Do I look like a teenager?" She shakes her head, amused. "Wizards have less power the older they get. I've got a little more on tap than most wizards my age because I'm an Advisory, but I still can't just throw it away on a translocation. Especially not when the train's a straight shot."

"You're less powerful the older you are? I'd have thought it'd be the other way."

"Less powerful, but smarter. It balances out."

Steve chuckles. “Smart beats strong nine times out of ten.”

“Well,” Nita says, glancing at his biceps, “strong comes in pretty handy.”

She catches his eye as he looks over at her. “Yeah, well, generally I want both on my team.”

Nita snickers suddenly. “You should meet Carmela. No, scratch that, you shouldn't meet Carmela, she'd eat you alive.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“She's a consummate flirt, she's a menace. No, I just thought of her because she usually packs the most firepower of anyone I know. She's pulled my ass out of the fire a couple of time.”

“Sounds like a good friend to have around,” Steve comments. Nita nods, and they walk in silence for a moment, coming to a stop at a corner to wait for the crosswalk.

“You don't think I could handle a flirt?” Steve says abruptly.

Nita blinks. “Huh?”

“--Never mind.”

“Um?”

Steve waves a hand. “Forget I said anything.”

“Oh, there's the light,” Nita says hastily.

On the other side of the street, Steve coughs and gestures at the neighborhood. “So you don't get to Brooklyn much?”

“No – well, more than I did when I was living in Hempstead. I have some friends from school who live over here. But there's so much to do in Manhattan, between work and everything else.” She pulls a wry face. “And these days I'm in DC half the time. I'm surprised you had the time to come up here.”

“They can't use me every minute of the day.” Steve shrugs. “It's not like being on the front. Nowadays if something comes up, they call me in. But it's not as often as you'd think. The rest of the time is . . . mine to do with as I please.”

Something in his tone makes Nita look up at him, something like wistfulness. It's the kind of tone she'd use the word _pang_ with. “And what does it please you to do with it?”

“Catch up.” He gives her a small smile, his tone normal again. “There's a lot to catch up on. I started a list.”

“What's on it?”

His smile widens. “A lot of movies,” he confesses. “And a lot of history. I want to watch the moon landing. Got any recommendations?”

“For movies or history?”

“Both.”

“Howard Zinn. _A People's History of the United States_. It's not the rosiest view of America, but it's important. I read it in high school and spent a week wanting to go into politics just to fix things.”

“So why didn't you?”

“I hate public speaking.”

Steve laughs. “Yeah, I used to, too.”

“Anyway, you should see _Star Wars_ , obviously--”

“So I hear.”

“--And, what else, _Some Like It Hot_ , uh, _2001\. The Silence of the Lambs_? Oh, you should read _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ , definitely. Oh, and _Catcher in the Rye_. And _Howl_ , you've got to read _Howl_.” She pauses. “What?”

“Nothing.” He's grinning.

“You're laughing at me,” she accuses. “You are laughing at my enthusiasm for the written word.”

“I'm not!”

Nita sighs tragically. “It's okay, I'm used to it.”

“I am not laughing!” Steve says. Chuckling. Nita sticks her tongue out at him, and he starts laughing in earnest, and Nita can't keep her face straight very long after that.

“Seriously,” she says, once they both calm down a little. “You need to read _Howl_. And you need to watch the moon landing. And then talk to me about them.”

“I'll add them to the list,” he promises.

They duck into a café at last, shaking water off their jackets and out of their hair, and order coffee, settle themselves at a table. There's a minute or two of companionable silence as they warm up and sip their drinks.

“Can I ask you something?” Nita asks, eventually. When Steve nods, she continues, “Who were you there to see?”

He pauses, then looks down at the table, the corner of his mouth quirking up in a sad little smile. “My folks. They've got a nice spot, they're together.”

Nita nods. “It looks like a nice place.”

“Yeah.”

Nita hesitates, and then adds, quietly, “My mom doesn't have a grave – she was cremated. But sometimes I think it'd be nice to have someplace to visit her, you know?”

“It gives you an anchor.” He shrugs. “For better and worse. Can I ask what happened?”

“She died when I was fourteen. Brain tumor. It was . . .” She shakes her head. “It was hard. And some days it hits really hard.”

“What was she like?”

“Mom?” She grins. “She was a dancer back in the day. A ballerina. And then she kind of focused on helping my dad with his flower shop, raising me and my sister.”

“Your mom was a ballerina?”

“Oh, yeah. She was _tough_ , though.”

“Not surprised.” He nods at her. “She turned you out, didn't she?”

Nita blinks at him, taken aback, and then shakes her head, laughing. “Thanks. What did your mom do?"

"She was a nurse. She pretty much raised me on her own, after my father died."

"On her own? In the depression?" Nita echoes. " _That's_ tough."

"She was a hell of a woman."

"She must have been, to turn out you."

Steve ducks his head, half-smiling. “And your dad?”

“Oh, he's a florist. He's been running his shop – God, since before I was born.” She raises her eyebrows. “He used to read your comics. Got them from my granddad.”

Steve gives her an incredulous look. “Are you trying to make me feel old?”

“No!” Nita shakes her head. "No way. I don’t think of you as _old_. I mean, compared to some of my friends, you’re barely out of adolescence.” She brushes her hair back behind her ear. “It’s just -- weird. Like hanging out with a celebrity.”

Steve's eyebrows go up, and he leans forward, lowering his voice. “You're a _wizard_ , you've been to other worlds, and hanging out with _me_ is what's weird?”

Nita laughs. “If there's one thing I've learned as a wizard? It's that weird is all relative.”

Steve grins and lifts his cup. “You know what?” he says. “I'll drink to that.”

 


	7. Periodic Evaluations

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you squint, we're starting to get into Captain America 2 spoilers -- that is, events from here on out are going to be increasingly informed by the events of Cap 2. No specific spoilers in here, but there's, I dunno, thematic stuff? If you squint.

"So I keep getting these reports with these curious omissions in them."

Nita feels a lot like she's been summoned to the principal's office. Presumably that's the point. Fury has the whole schtick down: the single chair in front of his desk for her to sit and stew in, the hands clasped behind the back as he looks out the window, the studied casualness of his tone. It's all very performative.

"And from agents I know to be meticulous, too, which is what caught my eye."

(Also, does Fury ever take off that trench coat? It seems like weird office attire, but Nita's never seen him wear anything else.)

"Omissions like how, precisely, Agent Romanov got into a vault in the Caymans without cracking the security system."

"She's a very resourceful person," Nita points out. "Air ducts?"

The look Fury turns and gives her makes her quail a little. She shuts up.

"I know you people have some pretty strict codes of behavior when it comes to truth-telling," Fury says, leaning his knuckles on his desk. "If I asked you, point-blank, whether you've been going on missions with my tactical team, without my approval, in spite of your complete lack of high-level security clearance or S.H.I.E.L.D. field training, what kind of answer would I get?"

"If you asked me?"

"Hypothetically," he says, very dry.

"I ... would tell you," Nita says after a moment, watching him watch her pick her words carefully, "that I have never asked any of your agents to lie for me. And that I have never disobeyed any of your direct orders. None of Captain Rogers or Agent Romanov's, either." She pauses before adding, "And I'd tell you that if you gave me a direct order to _not_ go on missions with your tactical team, obviously I'd take that into account going forward."

Fury's eyebrows go up. "You'd tell me all that."

"Yes, sir." She takes a breath. "You're my boss here, sir, and I've got nothing but the highest respect for you. But ultimately you're not the One I answer to. If I'm called on to help the Universe in an active role, I'm not going to ignore that call."

"You know, some people might call that dangerously close to insubordination, Callahan."

Nita relaxes slightly when he calls her _Callahan_ ; Fury only seems to call her _Ms_. when he's distancing himself from her somehow, out of professionalism or annoyance. "I'm an independent contractor, Director Fury, I don't think it's technically possible for me to be insubordinate to you."

"And here I thought 'technically possible' was an unknown concept to people in your line of work." He sits down heavily, lacing his fingers on the desk. "Let me make a few things very clear. I value the work you've been doing around here the last few months. I value the way you've integrated with the team. And I value very fucking highly the security of this agency, and country, and planet. As, I believe, do you. So I trust you're going to continue doing _all_ the good work you've been doing up to this point. Got it?"

Nita nods slowly. "Understood."

"This is _not_ carte blanche. Is _that_ understood? If I get wind that you put any mission in danger, we'll be having another of these conversations, and it is not going to go your way."

Nita tamps down her immediate defensive reaction of _I would never put a mission in danger_ and nods. "That's understood, sir."

"Good." He turns towards his computer, a clear dismissal. "Get enough field experience and I might even send you on some missions myself."

"Does that mean I'd get a snappy uniform?"

Fury gives her a look, and Nita hustles out of his office.

 

* * *

 

"Hey, Nat--"

As ever, it seems, Nita finds herself jogging to keep up with Natasha. Natasha is _shorter_ than her in flats, they've determined this, but that woman can power-walk like you wouldn't believe. And in heels. It's just not fair.

Nita has to dodge around a couple members of the tactical team; the hall is half full of people scrambling to get to their mission. Natasha gives her a sideways smile as she catches up. “Nita. You coming out to Cardiff with us?"

"Yeah, I am, but look -- have you been leaving me out of your reports?"

"Yeah," Natasha says, as if this was common knowledge and Nita is behind the curve. Possibly -- probably, Nita amends, irked -- that's the case.

"Fury just pulled me into his office and gave me a very stern . . ." She trails off. What was it, anyway? He didn't tell her off for going on the missions with Steve and Natasha, he just warned her not to fuck up.

"Look," she finishes, lamely.

"I wasn't aware he gave any other kind."

"Natasha! Why aren't I officially on these missions?"

“Is that what Fury told you?”

“Is it true?”

Natasha stops, turning to face her, and arches her eyebrows. "Why do you think I'd leave your contributions out of the reports?"

"Well," Nita stammers, put on the spot, "I'm not a real agent."

"And?"

". . . There are liability issues?"

Natasha rolls her eyes, more amused than mocking. "Technically, yes, although you signed away a lot of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s responsibility for your personal safety in your contract. You should read the fine print."

"I always read the fine print," Nita says sharply.

Natasha glances up at her, her expression unreadable for a moment, then nods. "Sorry."

Nita shakes her head. "Just, look, why else?"

The way Natasha's looking at her – weighing, calculating – unnerves Nita. And annoys her, a little. It seems like everyone in this building is constantly deciding anew whether or not she's trustworthy. When does she get to pass the test for good?

She must pass this time, anyway, because Natasha takes her by the arm and pulls her aside. A pair of agents stride past them towards the hangar; Natasha waits until they're past to speak.

“Not everyone in this organization needs to know what you're capable of,” she says, her voice low and even. “So I made a call.”

“But people _do_ know what I'm capable of,” Nita says, startled. “I mean, people know I'm a wizard – I've done spells in front of people in the labs.”

“Not the same kind of spells you do in the field.”

“Not – really, I guess.”

Natasha nods. “And not everyone needs to know everything about you. You don't play all your cards at once in this game.”

“This isn't a _game!_ I'm not here to play anything, Natasha, I'm just here to help!”

Natasha's eyebrows go up. “Maybe you ought to sit this one out.”

Nita has the sudden sinking feeling that the next time someone gives her that weighing look, she's going to be found wanting. She takes a deep breath, dropping her gaze to the floor.

“It's your call,” she says. “I'm just here to help, Natasha. And I'm not going to jeopardize your mission by making you bring me along if you can't trust me.”

“Nita.” Natasha's tone brings Nita's gaze back up to her face, and Nita's a little surprised to find her smiling, ruefully. “I trust your heart's in the right place.” With that, she starts back down the hall – but not without a conciliatory touch on Nita's arm as she passes. “Sit this one out.”

“Yeah,” Nita murmurs, to the empty hall. “I will.”

 


	8. Trust Falls

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No spoilers in this chapter! Nnnnnot technically. Again, thematic stuff, and also I'm a terrible and unapologetic _bricoleur_ , but I think you're only going to spot Cap 2 stuff in here if you've actually seen the movie.

Part of the problem is that she can't talk to anyone about it.

Over the years Nita's gotten used to keeping quiet about certain parts of her life with certain people. College was four years at NYU with only two other wizards in her cohort, one of whom was from Peoria and very busy in her lighting design major, and the other of whom was an Alaskan business major who Nita just couldn't bring herself to like. So she told partial truths and bonded with her classmates over homework and Frisbee games and late nights, and called Kit or Ronan or Dairine to decompress long-distance about errantry. She compartmentalized.

But she can't call her wizardly friends and say _I've been going on unauthorized tactical missions for an intelligence agency and I've been benched_  – not without breaking at least one clause in her contract and opening herself up to a host of legal problems and a pink slip. She _definitely_ can't go to any of her – colleagues, “friends” is too strong a word – at S.H.I.E.L.D. and say _People are keeping information from me and expecting me to hide information I don't even know I have_. Most of the agents would probably shrug and say “So in other words, it's Monday.”

And as much as she wants to, she can't go to Steve and say _Does Natasha trust me?_ , like a petulant middle-schooler ferreting out intelligence on a crush. It wouldn't be useful and it wouldn't be fair: Steve works with Natasha much more closely than with her, and interfering with that relationship could be dangerous for them. Besides, for all she knows Steve is with Natasha on this one. Maybe he's been filing reports that skip over the shield spells and the Mason's Word and the air-walking, too.

So she compartmentalizes, and compartmentalizes, and finds herself stuck in a compartment that's only big enough for her.

 

* * *

 

After a couple of weeks, Dairine notices.

They're both home for a weekend, helping their dad fill the empty nest for a little while, sharing stories of assignments and off-planet adventures and the cafe owner next door to the flower shop that brings their dad free coffee every day. Dad and Dairine tease Nita about being a spy, since most of her stories about S.H.I.E.L.D. are deliberately boring, concerned with silly office politics and DC traffic. Nita laughs and demurs and offers to take the dishes into the kitchen.

Dairine finds her in her room, later; Nita is stretched out on her childhood bed, reading up on declensions, when Dairine pokes her head around the door.

"Can I come in?"

Nita closes her manual. "There was a time you wouldn't have asked."

"Yeah, when I was ten. I'm taking that as a yes." She comes in, shutting the door behind her, and flops onto Nita's desk chair. The chair squeaks in protest. " _Sorry_."

" _Getting old,_ " the chair mumbles, and falls silent.

"Poor thing. Probably ought to do some repairs on you," Nita says.

"In your oodles of free time?"

"Yeah, exactly. What's up?"

"What's up with _you?”_ Dairine replies. "Something's bugging you."

Nita sighs and sits up, resigned. "That obvious?"

"It's always that obvious, Neets. To me," she amends. "Your poker face has gotten a little better."

"What a relief."

"What is it?"

Nita gives her sister a rueful look. "I can't really talk about most of it."

"Is it S.H.I.E.L.D. stuff?"

Nita nods.

"Errantry related?"

"Not really," she admits. "Not exactly."

"So talk about it generally. I'm not saying tell me state secrets or anything, I'm not _that_ nosy."

"You're not?"

" _Neets,_ ” Dairine says, exasperated, and grabs a Kleenex off Nita's desk to throw at her. "I'm trying to _help_."

Nita laughs in spite of herself. "Sorry, sorry." She sobers, considering how to put this. "Someone I work with has been keeping me out of the loop about stuff that concerns me."

"Did they tell you why?"

"Yeah."

"Was it a good reason?"

Nita frowns. "I . . . guess so. They certainly think it is, and they know more about the situation than I do. I guess."

"You guess."

"They know more about -- their side of things. They don't know as much about wizardry."

It's Dairine's turn to frown. "So there's a spelling problem?"

"No." Nita shakes her head. "It's . . . Non-wizards don't get how important the truth is to what we do. And I feel like I'm being asked to hide things. I don't know from who, or why exactly, but -- I don't know if I can do wizardry if I'm hiding things. Not the kind of wizardry I might need to do."

There's silence for a minute, as Dairine digests this. "Do you trust the person asking you to hide stuff?" she asks finally.

Nita sighs. "Not the way I did."

Dairine nods. "Do you trust anyone else there?"

". . . Yeah," she says slowly, thinking of Steve, "but I don't want to put him in the middle."

Dairine sighs. "Well, you can talk to the person you don't really trust and figure out if they actually want you to hide stuff, or you can talk to the person you trust and get his advice. I know which one I'd pick."

"Yeah," Nita says slowly, thoughtfully. "I see your point."

Dairine shrugs, leaning back in the chair until it squeaks tiredly again. "When everyone's keeping secrets, the best thing we can do is find someone we can trust with ours. Like, yeah, do you want to do wizardry in that environment for forever, no, do you want to do the big important stuff keeping secrets yourself, probably not. But if _you_ know who _you_ are, and someone else knows who you are, you've got a solid base."

Nita blinks at her. "Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. How did you get so smart?"

"I have _always_ been smart."

"Not _politically_ smart."

"I have always been politically smarter than you, too," Dairine says, getting up with a last squeak from the chair. "Also, Wellakhit."

Nita's eyebrows go up. "Oh. Right."

"Oh indeed." She tosses her hair and heads for the door. "You should ask me for advice more often."

"Yeah, whatever, Tyrion," Nita says amiably. "Hey, brat."

"What?"

"Love you."

"Love you too, dummy."

It takes a while for Nita to fall asleep, but when she finally does, she sleeps peacefully.

 

* * *

 

All that said, it takes her a couple days back at the Triskelion to work up the nerve to talk to Natasha. Okay, it's not exactly what Dairine recommended -- but Nita thinks, on balance, that Natasha is the one she knows is hiding things, and Natasha is the one who needs to trust her if they're going to be working together.

She catches Natasha sitting down, for once, in the otherwise empty locker room. (The locker room is one of the best perks of working here, Nita has to admit.) Natasha's hair is wet from a recent shower, and she's pulling on her shirt when Nita comes in and lets out a surprised, "--Hey."

"Hey, Nita," Natasha says, with a smile, as if they haven't been kind of avoiding each other for a couple weeks. "How're you?"

"I'm good -- do you have a minute?"

Nita thinks that, for once, she can see the guardedness come into Natasha's eyes, even though her smile is still friendly. "Sure."

Nita swallows, rubs the back of her neck. "I wanted to ask you about what you said -- that some people shouldn't know what I can do."

Natasha nods.

"What kind of people are you concerned about, anyway?"

Natasha's eyebrows go up. "Unscrupulous ones."

"Here?"

Natasha shrugs, nods.

"Is that a thing I should be concerned about, too?"

"You want the truth?"

"Yeah. Yeah, always."

Does a smile flicker across her face? If it does, it's gone immediately. Natasha takes a deep breath and steps closer, her voice very low, counteracting the echoes of the tile and steel.

"You should always be concerned about what people know about you and how they can use it. I've been at this a long time, Nita, so believe me: being careful with your self is always in your best interests."

Nita nods slowly. "So whose interests are you working in when _you_ keep back information about me?"

Natasha blinks slowly, considering Nita from the corner of her eye. It's an owlish sort of look, silent and predatory and old.

"Not just mine," she says quietly. "If that's what you're asking."

Nita swallows her first question -- _Mine, too?_ \-- and settles on her second. "Would you tell me who else's, if I asked?"

"Do you need to know?"

"I guess not really." Nita sighs. "I'd like to, but you don't owe me that."

Natasha nods, and waits, which Nita is grateful for. She needs a second to formulate her next request.

"I'd like to come on missions again," she says, very quiet. "I think I do more good there than I do twiddling my thumbs. I'm not crazy about doing it under the table, but I get why you -– and Fury –- want that. And I trust the calls you make." She takes a deep breath. "So. Assuming you want me along."

“You're not going to be bothered by the reports?”

Nita gives her a wry look. “Yeah, it'll bother me. I'm just not going to let it get in the way.”

Natasha smiles, ever so slightly. “Now you're getting the hang of the job.”

“Yowch.”

Natasha's expression turns ironic as she sits down to pull on her shoes. “You belong in a different line of work, Nita.”

“Yeah, probably.” She shrugs. “But I'm here. And I don't really believe in accidents.”

“Me neither.”

Whether she actually doesn't or she's just saying it to connect with Nita, Nita decides, is secondary. The effort to connect is what counts. Right?

“Well –- thanks for the talk,” she says, and starts for the sinks.

“Nita.”

She turns back. “Yeah?”

“Another thing you should keep in mind, if you're going to keep working here? Everyone lies.”

“I don't.”

“And that,” Natasha says, standing up and heading for the door, “is why Steve likes you.”

And she's gone, before Nita can ask what _that's_ supposed to mean.

But seriously, sometimes this place really does feel a hell of a lot like middle school.


	9. High-Pressure Environments

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No spoilers in this one! Lots of gunplay, though.

They're pinned down on two sides by gunfire, with a wall at their back and an uncertain exit strategy. The agent they were sent to retrieve is no help; she'd been battered into unconsciousness when they arrived, and Nita's pretty sure she managed to heal the worst effects of a concussion but she couldn't do anything for the woman's exhaustion. Natasha leans around the desk they're using for cover and fires off three quick shots. Nita feels the desk judder with the return fire. It can't last forever.

"They gonna run out of ammo?" Nita asks, breathless.

"Yeah, sometime after they've destroyed every piece of cover in the room," Natasha says. "Waiting them out isn't going to cut it."

"Nita," says Steve, "how many people can your shield cover?"

Nita tries to take internal stock, get a sense for how much power she can spare. She's already tired -- the combination of an involved working with Rhiow and the GCT team two days ago, and the strain of getting them into the building and healing Agent Tanaka. But she's got a little more. She has to have a little more.

"Two -- maybe three if everyone stays close." She glances between Natasha and Steve. "Not four."

Steve touches his ear. “Barton, what's your position?"

Nita doesn't hear the answer -- five months at S.H.I.E.L.D. and they still can't give her an earpiece -- but the answer doesn't seem satisfactory. "Still near the roof," he relays to Nita. "We can't rely on them getting here for backup before these guys get to us."

The militiamen punctuate this point with another round of bullets. A splinter of something slashes across Nita's cheek, leaving a thin, stinging cut. Wincing, Nita presses the heel of her hand to it.

"Get a shield up over you two," Steve snaps, pointing at Tanaka. "Get up towards the roof. Barton and his men are working their way down. They'll meet you."

"What about you two?"

"We've got this," Natasha says. The corner of her mouth lifts in a dangerous smirk. "Don't worry."

Well, she's a little worried about the militiamen, now, but they've made their bed. Nita turns to Tanaka and puts a hand on her shoulder.

"I'm going to need to you to lean on me, okay? I can't carry you. You have to stay really close and not panic, no matter what. Can you do that?"

Tanaka's eyes are still a little foggy, but she nods and slings her arm over Nita's shoulders. Nita braces herself to stand, closes her eyes, and starts the spell.

The gunfire recedes into the silence of the Universe leaning in and listening. It's a familiar spell, and not a long one, but Nita takes extra time in that eternal moment of spell-casting to bind the molecules of air tighter around them, to tell the laws of physics _Just here, just now, I need you to work like this, to absorb energy in this way, to release it in that -- and please, get us out of here safely._

The spell settles in around them like snow in a snow globe. The sound of the world returns, and Nita can feel an ache in her lungs as she heaves for breath, as if she's put on a burst of speed to finish a marathon. She hopes it's enough.

"Okay, Gwen," she says to Tanaka, "I'll count three and then we'll stand up. Okay?"

Tanaka nods. Nita looks at Steve and Natasha and adds, in a sudden fierce rush, "Don't you _dare_ get killed."

Steve gives her a grin and Natasha gives her a smirk, both of which are probably intended to be reassuring but mainly come across as slightly adrenaline-crazed. "See you upstairs, Callahan," Steve says.

"Aye-aye, Captain," Nita says. "Okay, Gwen, one, two, _three_."

They stand up, and instantly bullets are flying. Nita feels them _ponnng_ off the shield. The air around them starts to warm up as the shield disperses the absorbed energy as heat. Tanaka winces at the first round of gunshots. So, to be frank, does Nita.

Steve and Natasha start laying suppressing fire, which Nita figures is their cue to move. The shield might not hold up to a barehanded attack well -- it's designed to stop bullets, not blows -- and Nita would rather not put it to the test if one of the militiamen gets it in his head to come after them. "Come on," she tells Tanaka. "We're okay, we gotta move."

They make it to the stairs -- unexpectedly cool and quiet after the bullet-strewn office -- and start climbing. Tanaka is doing her best not to lean on Nita, but her best is still the best of a woman who's been held captive for a day and a half. Her weight and the strain of the shield are burning Nita out, slowly but surely.

They're three flights up, with an unknown number to go, when the door on the landing above them slams open. The militiaman who comes through is two steps down the stairs towards them before he registers what he's seeing.

He and Nita lock eyes for a second, and then he lifts his gun, and she grabs Tanaka and yanks them both down into a protective ball on instinct, wrapping herself around the agent, and he opens fire. The machine gun sounds like the world's biggest, angriest sewing machine in the enclosed and echoing space. The temperature around Nita and Tanaka jumps ten degrees in seconds. The rattle of spent casings on the concrete ring in Nita's ears.

The assault lasts about twenty seconds. Nita flinches when it stops and lifts her head. The militiaman is staring open-mouthed.

"What in the _fuck_ are _you?_ "

Nita lifts a shaking hand as he starts to come down the stairs towards them. "I'm the girl who's gonna rip you into your component atoms if you come _a fucking step closer--_ "

He hesitates.

And then an arrow slams into his shoulder.

The force of the shot sends him staggering into the wall before he goes down, his gun clattering down the stairs to the landing below. Nita looks up, and Clint Barton grins down at her from a few flights overhead.

"Should we call that one?" he calls down.

"Get down here and help me," Nita calls back. "Gwen -- Gwen, you okay? Hey, talk to me, I'm sorry I grabbed you like that."

"I'll live," Tanaka croaks. A moment later, Barton is beside them, helping Tanaka stand up. Nita drops the shield, exhausted, and turns towards the militiaman.

He's still breathing, although he's white-faced and sweating. Nita crawls over and examines the arrow sticking out of his shoulder.

"I can help--"

"He tried to kill you," Barton points out behind her.

"I don't care!” she throws over her shoulder. “I'm going to pull this out and patch you up. Don't kill me whole I'm doing it, you'll probably die too."

"You pull that arrow," Barton says, "he's gonna bleed out--"

"Be quiet," Nita snaps. She is not, it has to be said, very careful about yanking the arrow out of the militiaman's flesh, but she dips her fingers in his blood and does a quick, messy patch job she can on the wound. It'll keep him from dying; that's all she needs.

Barton is frowning when she pulls away and looks at him. She must look awful, red-faced and sweat-soaked from exertion and dispersed heat, but he doesn't say anything. He just nods and starts up the stairs, helping Tanaka along the way.

Nita turns back to the militiaman, who's staring at her, wide-eyed with terror and the remnants of pain.

"If you," Nita pants, "know what's good for you -- you'll go and surrender. Got it?"

“What did you do to me?” he breathes.

“More than you deserved,” she grumbles. Somehow or other she gets to her feet and starts up the stairs after Barton. It does occur to her, after a flight of stairs, that the militiaman could have another gun on him, but she shrugs off the thought. He hasn't shot her yet, after all.

The sight of the Quinjet on the roof is one of the most beautiful things she's seen all year. Tanaka's already loaded in, being tended to by the field medic. Barton is nowhere in sight – if Nita had to guess, she'd say he went back down to help Natasha and Steve mop up. Nita drags herself up into the jet, slumps into a jump seat, and waits.

It's only about ten minutes before the rest of the team arrives. Natasha and Barton stride past her, headed for the cockpit; other agents settle into their seats and strap themselves in with varying levels of exhaustion. Nita lets out a breath of relief when Steve boards, another when the jet powers up and lifts off.

Steve checks in with a couple people before making his way to one of the empty seats beside Nita. She grins up at him – but her smile vanishes when he pulls off his helmet and reveals a nasty-looking contusion on the left side of this face, from his cheek to the edge of his eye socket. “Holy fuck, Steve, what happened?”

“Guy got me pretty hard with the butt of his rifle. It's fine, the helmet took most of it.”

“Doesn't _look_ fine.” She hauls herself upright and reaches out to tilt his chin to the side so she can examine it. “Your eye's swelling up.”

“It's fine, Nita, I heal up pretty quick.”

“I can fix it if you just give me a second--”

“Nita.” He catches her hand, his glove rough on her skin. “You're wiped out.”

“I've got a little more in me,” she insists. It's not technically a lie.

Steve lets out a little breath of laughter. “It's _okay_ , Nita. Relax.”

(His eyes are really, _really_ blue. Well, eye. The one she can see, since the other one's swelling shut.)

“Are you sure?”

“Positive,” he says, and squeezes her hand lightly. “Don't you know when to quit?”

“'Pparently not.” She draws back, letting her hand fall away from his face. Steve lets it go a second later. “Don't you?”

“Never did,” he says with a smile – and for all that the Quinjet's engines are loud and post-mission chatter surrounds them, for just a moment, Nita feels as quiet as the middle of a spell.

 


	10. Non-Compete Clauses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I will go ahead and say this one has spoilers for Cap 2 in it, at least thematic ones. At this point, if you want to go in completely unspoiled, you probably want to come back to this fic after you've seen the movie.
> 
> Also huge, HUGE thanks to batyatoon for the idea that's the core of this chapter, and for helping me flesh out ideas and plotlines as I go.

 

So yeah, sometimes it's gunplay and healing spells and rides in the Quinjet and being pretty sure a bunch of people you like are going to die and the nation is going to be damaged in some way.

But not _all_ the time. Just like wizardry is sometimes epic songs beneath the sea and duels high above the waters of Mars, but sometimes it's just talking to the tree in your backyard or chilling at the Crossings. And sometimes working at S.H.I.E.L.D. is a Friday night at a hole-in-the-wall pub in DC where your drinking companions happen to be Captain America and a couple of super-spies. And an intern? Nita is still not entirely clear on what Darcy Lewis's relationship to anyone here is, but Darcy is about the same age as her, completely unintimidated by anyone at S.H.I.E.L.D., and so entirely, attractively self-assured that Nita has spent all evening trying to figure out how to set her up with Carmela. 

It's not where Nita would have predicted herself ending up when she started here. Seeing Natasha and Clint out and about, in civilian clothes, chatty and relaxed, is particularly weird. But she's not complaining. 

Darcy and Clint have been locked in some kind of one-up competition for the last few minutes about the weirdest place they've ever been thrown out of, with Natasha -- Nat, again, that is, around Darcy – reminding Clint about details of some of his exploits. Steve and Nita are sitting next to each other, stifling their laughter as the competition gets ever more ridiculous.

"You have anything to contribute?" Nita says out of the corner of her mouth.

"I was too busy getting beat up as a kid to get thrown out of anywhere," Steve replies. 

"Hey, me too!" 

She's right in that sweet spot, where the beer makes her happy but not drunk, and she can, if she bothers to think about it, feel Steve's warmth where their elbows are leaning in the table next to each other, and she keeps beaming down at the table without any specific reason. Steve grins every time he catches her smiling, like he can't help himself; Nita's pretty sure she's caught Nat doing the same every time Steve grins. She's not sure whether _feedback loop_ or _mutual appreciation society_ is the more appropriate term here. Whatever. The atmosphere at the table is warm and congenial and Nita can think of nowhere she'd rather be. 

"Blood bank," says Barton, thoughtfully. 

"What were you doing in a blood bank?" Nita asks. "Robbing it?" 

"Excuse me, I was there on business." 

"Soooo you were robbing it?" Darcy says. 

". . . Only of cookies." 

The table cracks up. Barton looks injured. "They give them away for free, it's not _robbery_." 

"They are not free!" Nita objects. "They cost a pint of blood!" 

Darcy wrinkles her nose. "Wow. Gross." 

"Top that," Barton challenges her. 

"Pfff, easy, thrown out of KFC." 

Barton looks unimpressed. "Why?" 

"For being part of a sit-in protesting the existence of the Double Down." She lifts her chin smugly. "I'm banned for life."

“Not protesting animal cruelty or anti-union management or something?” Nita asks. “Just the existence of the Double Down?”

“Have you _seen_ it? It's an affront to nature.”

"What's a Double Down?" Steve asks. 

Darcy grins. "You're adorable and I apologize for the things I'm about to inflict on your imagination." 

"Hey, Nita," Nat breaks in, quietly, "someone's trying to get your attention." 

Nita blinks at her and turns to see who Nat's talking about. Standing a few feet from the table, a drink in his hand and an easy smirk on his face, is a tall, beautiful young man with red hair poking out from under a slouchy OBEY beanie. His clothes are casual but well-tailored: a black suit jacket over jeans and a gray undershirt.

Nita's warm glow evaporates. 

"Hi, Nita," the Lone Power says.

She's not sure what her face looks like, but Steve is suddenly sitting up very straight next to her, and Barton and Nat both have a watchful look in their eyes. And Nita finds, only somewhat to her surprise, that she's _annoyed_.

No, actually, more than that, she's _angry_ . 

“Would you guys excuse me a moment?” she says to the table, her eyes on Its face.

“Who's this?” Steve asks.

She stands up. “An old friend. Back in a sec.” 

The Lone Power's grin stretches wider as she brushes past It, headed for the door of the pub; It turns and follows her a moment later. They pass by the bar on the way out, and It leaves Its drink on the counter, fastidiously putting a coaster over the top. Something about the humanity of it all rankles Nita even further. 

It's chilly outside -- milder than New York is this time of year, but cold enough that Nita almost wishes she'd brought her jacket. Not that she intends to be out here long. Folding her arms, she turns to glare at It. 

“What do you want?”

Its eyebrows go up. “Little off-script, aren't we?” 

“I am _not_ on errantry and I would rather not greet you _or_ defy you right now,” Nita snaps, “but I will if I have to. _What_ do you _want?_ ”

It laughs, digs in the pocket of Its jacket, and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. “Got a light?” 

Nita does not dignify this with a response. 

It tsks and shakes a cigarette out from the pack. “There's no need to be _sulky_ .” It puts the cigarette between Its lips and snaps Its fingers to produce a flame. Nita half expects It to blow some kind of Carrollian smoke figure when It exhales, but the smoke is just normal tobacco smoke, as far as she can tell. 

She waves a hand through the cloud of smoke, wrinkling her nose. “You know, I was kind of busy in there. If you don't start telling me why you're here, I'm leaving.” 

“Back to your friends from S.H.I.E.L.D.?” It raises Its eyebrows again.

“. . . Yes,” she says, eyeing It.

“They seem nice. Especially the Captain.”

“Yep, I'm leaving,” she announces, and starts for the door.

“Nita,” It says, low and almost sing-song, “you want to hear me out before you do anything.”

The chill that goes down her back has nothing to do with the winter wind. Unwillingly, she turns back. It's watching her with narrowed eyes. Something in the lines of Its face seems to have slipped; Its beauty is less human the longer she looks at It, more like Itself. 

“Believe me or not,” It says, “I'm here to offer you a chance to do good. You like those, don't you?”

“Uh, yeah, you expect me to trust anything _you_ offer me, after everything we've been through?”

“This isn't a deal, Nita, it's a warning.” The end of Its cigarette flares red as It takes a drag. “S.H.I.E.L.D. is an odd place to find a wizard.”

“I go where I'm needed.”

“Ha. And there's the problem.” It points the cigarette at her accusingly. “You should never have been sent here.”

“What are you talking about?”

It – hesitates. Nita's annoyance is ebbing away, replaced by tense confusion. The Lone Power looks up at the sky, where the clouds are reflecting the orange of the city lights, takes a drag on the cigarette, and blows out a cloud of Its own. 

“Earthlings,” It says, softly, “really are tricky. A paltry seven billion of you, a fraction of a fraction of the sentient Life in the Universe, and yet you manage to be truly -- _notable_ , in your ambivalence. Your indecisiveness. You know I'd love to put you up on the scoreboard as a victory of mine. And They'd love to do the same on Theirs.” Its lip curls. “But you just never _commit_. So I do my part, and you” -- It waves a hand at Nita -- “and your ilk and the rest of Them do Their work, and we end up right back at stalemate, and you would not _believe_ . . .” Its voice grows ragged, angry, bitter. “You would not _believe_ how _frustrating_ you are.”

Nita's not sure what to say to that. The tension in her shoulders hasn't gone away, though. 

It taps the ash off Its cigarette, inhales smoke, exhales, composing Itself. “And direct intervention is getting us nowhere.” 

“Not to blow my own horn,” Nita mutters, “but I think our side's doing pretty well with direct intervention.”

It throws her a disdainful look. “Do you? Oh, _you_ , you and your sister and your old partners, you have done _marvelous_ work for the Powers, there's no doubt about that. But do you honestly think a few aspects of me reconfigured or trapped or turned has made a difference here? Especially now, here, after all the things you've seen done?” It nods towards the pub. “The things you've seen _them_ do?” 

To that, Nita says nothing. 

It smiles, bitter but satisfied. “See? Stalemate.” 

“Are you going somewhere with this?”

It lets out a breath of laughter and drops the cigarette to the pavement, grinds it out with Its heel. “There are events in motion here that I'm very interested in seeing played out. So's the Champion. And we thought -- why not let them play out uninterrupted? Why not see what happens if we take the hands-off approach? Why not see which way the scales tip when we're not leaning on them?” 

Nita gives It a sidelong look. “Whose idea was that?” 

It grins. “What, do you think the Champion is too noble to come up with that on Their own?” 

And the truth is, she's not sure. She shrugs, non-committal. “It sounds like the kind of deal that's more likely to favor you.” 

At that, It _laughs_ . “So _you_ have so little faith in your species that you'd rather babysit it than see what it does on its own?” It tsks. “Haven't you seen how well _that_ thought process turns out?” 

“That is--” she starts, angrily, and stops before she can say something she regrets. Not that she doesn't regret her silence, too, since the Lone Power just keeps grinning at her. “So you guys have a bet.”

“Something like that.”

“What kind of stakes are you playing for?”

It shrugs. “Victory is its own reward.” Its expression turns a little sour. “Unfortunately.” Glancing towards her, It continues, “The point is, the outcome is supposed to be determined by _them_ . Humans. No interference by any Power allowed.” 

“So what are _you_ doing here?”

It arches an eyebrow. “Making sure They don't cheat by sending a wizard on errantry to S.H.I.E.L.D. Because obviously, if _They_ get _Their_ fingers in this when _I'm_ keeping out of it, it's all forfeit.” 

Nita's heart drops. 

“I -- but I'm not on errantry.”

It looks dubious. 

“I'm _not_ ,” she insists.

“You're not behaving like it,” It says, very dry.

“What, do you want me to say it in the Speech?” she says, trying not to sound desperate. “I'm not on active assignment. The Powers did _not_ send me on any of these missions, I took them on independently.”

It laughs again, cruelly amused. “Do you believe that?” 

Nita swallows. There's no such thing as coincidence, but -- but would They cheat? Would They have set her up to be involved in -- whatever it is that's going on here, unknowing, so They could say They weren't interfering? 

She's not sure. 

“What is it you're asking me to do?”

“Oh, I'm not asking you to do anything.” It shrugs. “I'm just giving you the information you need to make a choice. Serve your own good, or serve the greater good? Put yourself in harm's way, or step back and let others do it for you? You know how I work, Nita.” It smiles. “It's _always_ your choice.”

In the silence that follows this, the wind gusts around them, colder and colder, pulling the heat from Nita's skin and vapor from her breath. 

She can't think what to do. 

“Everything okay out here?”

She jerks around at the sound of Steve's voice, suddenly and totally filled with dread. “Steve!” 

“You've been gone a while,” he says. He's looking more at the Lone Power than at her, though his eyes flick to hers, questioningly. “Is everything all right?”

“We were just catching up,” the Lone Power says with a bright, beautiful smile.

“Nita?” Steve asks, looking her full in the face now. “Everything okay?”

Nita shakes her head and grabs Steve's arm. “We're done. Let's go inside.” 

“Nita,” the Lone Power says behind her, “don't forget. It'll all be forfeit.”

“Hey.” Steve takes half a step towards It. “She said you're done.”

“ _Steve_ ,” Nita says, and slips into the Speech without thinking, “ _come inside with me_.”

He gives her a sharp look. She squeezes his arm, not daring to look straight at him, not sure what he'd see in her face. “Please.” _Please don't get into this fight_ , she thinks. _Please don't start something you can't win_ . 

After a moment, he nods, and though he gives the Lone Power another warning glance over his shoulder, he follows her back into the pub. Nita doesn't turn back to see if It follows them inside. She's afraid if she looks back, she'll lose something -- she'll come apart, she'll dissolve into smoke or salt tears, she'll find herself holding nobody's arm. Superstitious, maybe, but she listens to that fear. 

Inside, Nita lets go of Steve and hurries back to the group, with Steve trailing behind her. The conversation between Nat and Darcy cuts off abruptly when she reaches the table, which does not make her feel any better about anything. “Sorry, guys,” she says, her tone almost normal, “I need to get out of here.” 

“Who the hell was that?” Barton asks. “Everything okay?”

“Nobody you want to know.”

“He looked familiar,” Nat says, very soft, more to herself than anything.

Nita shivers, and then startles when a hand touches her back. She looks up sharply into Steve's concerned gaze. Concerned and very, very piercing. 

“Nita,” he murmurs. “What's wrong? What was he talking about?”

And that's the thing about Steve, isn't it? That's the thing she's thought since she met him -- that his eyes are like Ronan's were when the Champion looked out from them. That there's something about him that's not wizardly or immortal or anything superhuman, that's just him, that's terrifically _good_ . 

If the Bright Powers have a human representative in this -- whatever it is -- she's guessing it's Steve. 

What counts as interference, here? 

She shakes her head, dropping her gaze. “I really don't want to talk about it, Steve.” 

“. . . Okay.” But he doesn't drop his hand. “Where are you going?”

“Back to the hotel.” 

“Do you want me to come with you? Make sure he doesn't bother you again?”

"I don't want you mixed up with him, Steve," she snaps, before she can stop herself. Steve's eyebrows go up in surprise, and Nita winces. "I'm sorry, I just . . ." 

She glances towards the bar. The Lone Power -- and Its drink -- are nowhere to be seen. Maybe that's a relief. “I'll be fine. I'll be fine.” 

If she says it enough times, she thinks, alone outside in the wind, maybe it'll be more than technically true. 


	11. Communication Issues

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No more spoilers than the last couple chapters.

It probably shouldn't come as a surprise to Nita that Natasha Romanov knocks on her door the next day.

More accurately, Natasha wakes Nita up by knocking on her door the next day. The night before involved very little sleep: Nita tossed and turned in bed, replaying the conversation with the Lone Power in her head, and only managed to get any rest when she moved to the couch in the suite's other room. And when she did sleep, she dreamed uneasy, shapeless dreams about fire and wind. When she saw the sunrise, she decided she wasn't going into work today, rolled over, hid her face in the corner of the couch cushions, and finally fell asleep out of exhaustion.

The knocking on her door wakes her up around nine. Groaning, she rolls over, yells “Just a minute” at the door, and shuffles into the bedroom to pull on some pants and a sweater. She checks the peephole at the door; when she spots red hair, she tries not to groan.

Natasha's got her arms folded when Nita finally opens the door. “Morning, sunshine.”

“Hi.” Nita rubs her eyes. “G'morning.”

Natasha frowns at her, waiting. When Nita says nothing, she asks -- fairly gently, all things considered -- “May I come in?”

“Yeah.”

She steps aside, and Natasha steps in, closing the door behind her. “Rough night?”

Nita grunts non-comittally.

“I'd have brought coffee, but I don't know how you take it.”

“I've got tea. You want some?”

Natasha nods. “Sure, thanks.”

As Nita works on convincing the coffee maker to wake up and start heating water, Natasha wanders around the room. Nita knows enough about her by now to feel pretty sure that she's gathering information. Nothing personal, it's just the kind of thing Natasha does.

“Black tea?”

“Yes, thank you.” Natasha pulls out the desk chair and sits down, crossing her legs and clasping her hands in her lap. Nita sighs inwardly, pours hot water into two cups, drops the teabags in and heads over to the couch.

Natasha accepts her tea with a small smile and swishes the teabag in the water. Nita makes some vague attempts at making the couch look more presentable by shoving the blanket into a corner. The silence . . . gets awkward.

“You wanna talk about it?” Natasha says, finally.

Nita snorts. “I didn't even come into work this morning. What makes you think I'll want to talk about it?”

“Because that's what you do,” Natasha replies, a slight emphasis on _you_. “You talk to people. You talk to _everything_. Not like some people I could name.”

“Lousy quality in a spy.”

“Good thing you're a wizard, not a spy, then.”

Nita glances up at her. Natasha watches her, steady, unreadable, still except for the slight motion of stirring her tea.

“What if I told you I _couldn't_ talk about it?”

“He won't let you? The man in the bar?”

_Not exactly a man_ , Nita thinks, and nods.

Natasha sits forward, leaning her elbows on her knees. “What's he have on you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I know how blackmail works. And I saw the look on your face when you came inside. He's threatened you with something. Not a physical threat, because you know we could help you with that. Something intangible.”

“. . . Well, you're not wrong.”

“Can you tell me what it is?” Her voice is gentle, the kind you'd use with an upset child or a scared animal.

Nita shakes her head. “I don't know if he'd consider it a violation of the deal. I can't risk it.”

“S.H.I.E.L.D. can protect you.”

“Not from this guy, Nat.” Sighing, she pulls her knees to her chest. “He's not human.”

“Asgardian?”

“You're . . . on the right track.”

“We can deal with those guys, too,” Natasha says, grim.

“This isn't someone you _deal with_ ,” Nita replies, a little sharp. “Not in this context. Look, I'm not in danger, that's not the problem. It's playing for different stakes. But just because It didn't threaten _me_ doesn't mean I want to risk what It _did_ threaten. And that's -- that's all I can tell you right now.” She rubs her forehead. “I haven't even had my tea yet.”

Natasha's still for a moment, then she sits back in her chair. “Okay,” she murmurs.

Nita blows out a breath and mutters into her cup, “None of this is okay.” Natasha doesn't take this as something she needs to respond to, thankfully, and they sit in silence for a minute or two.

This time, Nita speaks first. “I might need to leave S.H.I.E.L.D.”

Natasha doesn't speak -– but her focus on Nita sharpens noticeably.

“I might fuck up a lot of stuff if I stay,” Nita continues. “And I can't go on the tactical missions anymore. It might be better if I leave entirely. In the big picture.”

“Look, it's not that _I_ don't care about the big picture,” Natasha says, “but I don't think that guy cares about the big picture at all.”

“Oh, no, believe me.” The corner of Nita's mouth lifts. “That guy's got his eye on the biggest picture of all.”

Natasha raises her eyebrows, but after a moment, she sighs and says simply, “It's your choice.”

_It's always your choice_.

Nita flinches, looking down at her tea. “Yeah. That's the problem.”

  
  


* * *

 

She's not actually sure how Natasha convinces her to come into S.H.I.E.L.D., when all's said and done. Maybe she's just too tired of thinking, too tired of trying to make decisions, so when Natasha suggests she come in, just to see how she feels, Nita acquiesces. The fact that Natasha says she'll give her a ride doesn't hurt, either.

She begins to suspect a conspiracy when Steve is waiting for her outside the women's locker room, though.

“Hey.”

“Did Natasha tell you where to find me?” Nita asks, resigned.

“No, but she told me you were coming in. I figured . . .” He shrugs, nodding towards the locker room.

“You figured right.” She glances down at the floor. “Um, I'm -- how was the rest of your evening?”

“Honestly?” He shrugs, as if they're discussing nothing more fraught than the weather. “It was kinda dead after you left.”

She looks back up at him, and is rewarded with one of Steve's small, warm smiles, the kind she thinks of as _old-fashioned boy_ rather than _Captain America_. It's hard not to smile back. “Nice way of putting it.”

“Didn't want you to think we had a party without you.” His smile fades. “Who was that guy?”

Nita briefly entertains the idea of realizing she's forgotten something in the locker room, going back in, and staying there until Steve gets called away to do something Captain-y. Steve being Steve, though, he'd probably just wait her out and say something tragically nostalgic about learning patience.

“I've already been through this once with Natasha. You could ask her.”

“I don't think she'd tell me. And I'd rather hear it from you.”

She hesitates, uncertain, uncomfortably aware that someone -- or some One -- is probably watching them talk.

“. . . Do you want to get coffee or something?” Steve asks after a moment, soft, more than a little wry.

_I came here to work_ , she thinks, but it's not very convincing even to herself. What does she have to do today? Send emails? Collate some notes? Try very very hard to avoid the appearance of interfering with S.H.I.E.L.D.'s operations?

“Yeah.” She runs a hand through her hair. “I'll buy.”

There's a hall on the twentieth floor of the west tower where someone thought to put benches and armchairs. It's not quite a lounge, but it's relatively out of the way, and the wall of windows looks out over the river and the city. In the summer the view must be spectacular, Nita thinks; under the gray winter cloud cover, it leaves a little to be desired. At least the chairs are comfortable.

The complete lack of conversation while they were getting coffee and riding the elevator up here has been awkward enough that Nita's almost ready to spill everything -- about the Lone Power, the Champion, the bet, the choices she's made in the past, about Alaalu and Rashah and the Reconfiguration -- just to get it over with and relieve the tension.

Her brain is so full of enormous concepts and long stories that when they sit down next to each other on one of the couches and Steve asks, hesitantly, “He's not an -- ex, is he?” the only response Nita can give is _cracking up_.

“No,” she manages between laughs, “oh my _god_ , no, _please_ tell me you didn't get that vibe, oh my _god_.”

“I mean, you clearly had some history,” Steve says, eyeing her. “Figured I'd ask.”

“Steve, you're kind of a dork,” she says fondly. “No. Not an ex in any way, shape, or form.” Sobering, she adds, “You're not wrong about the history.”

“Is he a wizard?”

“Not -- really, no. But our history's through wizardry.”

Steve nods slowly. “What did he want from you?”

“It's . . . it's complicated. It's kind of personal” -- which feels a little like a lie -- “I can't really talk about it.”

“Can't or don't want to?”

Nita gives him a sidelong look. “Can't.”

Steve is quiet for a moment, looking down at the steam rising from his coffee cup. When he speaks, his voice is low and dangerously even.

“Did he threaten you?”

“Not physically.” She tries to keep her own voice calm, professional. “I'm not in danger.”

“Is that true?”

_That_ stings. “I don't lie.”

“No, but that doesn't mean you couldn't talk around the real truth.”

Which stings even more, since that is, in fact, what she's doing -- what she's been doing a lot, since coming to S.H.I.E.L.D. She presses her lips together, annoyed, and tries unsuccessfully to come up with an answer.

When the silence stretches past a couple seconds, Steve sighs. “I just don't want to be lied to.”

“I am _not_ lying to you.” Her hands are shaking, suddenly; she puts her coffee aside, laces her fingers, and clamps them between her knees. She can't look at him. “You know what, if I could tell you more, I would -- if I could tell you the whole truth -- but it's just not an option. It's _not_. Okay? It's not about you. I'm not personally in danger, and that _is_ the truth, and you're just going to have to trust me on it, and if you can't--” She shrugs, short and sharp. “I don't know whose problem that is.”

“--Hey.” He lifts up a hand, hesitates, and then touches her shoulder. “Hey, look at me.”

She does, after a moment. He reaches out to put his other hand over both of hers. “I just want to help, Nita. Whatever's going on, whatever you're trying to deal with, you don't have to deal with it alone. You've got a team. We've got your back.”

Nita swallows. “I'm telling you the truth.”

“I know.” He squeezes her hands. “I'm sorry I said that.”

The knot in her gut starts to loosen, and she lets out a long breath. “It's okay.”

“Are _you_ okay?”

She snorts. “Ask a stupid question, Cap . . .”

“This guy -- is he going to bother you again?

“I really can't say. I don't know. Probably not here.” Not if she's careful.

“If he does,” Steve says, frowning, “let me know.”

_He's out of your league, Cap_ , she thinks. Maybe it shows on her face, because Steve's expression turns rueful. “You won't, will you.”

“I'll be fine. I've dealt with him before.”

Something flashes in Steve's eyes, something like recognition, and he nods slowly. “Okay.” He rubs her shoulder with his thumb. “But you don't have to do it alone.”

Nita swallows hard again, and unlaces her fingers so she can wrap one hand around Steve's. His expression lightens into a surprised smile. When he squeezes her hand, she can feel the strength in his grip, restrained but steady.

“I really don't want to leave,” she breathes.

“Don't.”

She glances out at the river and squeezes his hand back.

“Yeah.” She closes her eyes, leaving herself nothing but his hands and his warmth and the sound of their breath. “DC's really growing on me.”

 


	12. Reorg

“Is there something you're not telling me?” Nick Fury asks, in the tone of one who expects to be told _yes_.

“Technically speaking there are a lot of things I'm not telling you,” Nita points out.

“Y'know,” Fury says, meditative, “just once I'd like to hire a specialist who doesn't think the word 'special' in their title means they have leeway to say whatever the hell goes through their head to me.”

“Sorry, sir.”

He waves a hand. “You're not on the tac team missions anymore.”

Nita tries not to tense visibly. She has no idea if she succeeds. “Officially, I never was. Right?”

“And apparently, unofficially, you're not participating anymore.”

Nita says nothing to that one. It seems wisest.

“No comment?”

“I'm just not sure why you're asking, sir.”

“Because,” Fury says, “change is either good or bad. So what's this one, Ms. Callahan? Good or bad?”

_Are you a good witch or a bad witch_ , Nita thinks. “It is what it is, sir. I needed to not be on the tactical missions, so I'm not. That's all I can say.”

“Is that all there is to it?”

Nita shrugs. Telling Steve and Natasha _There are things I can't say_ is one thing; telling Fury that is quite another. Fury's frown deepens.

“Are you all right, Callahan?”

The question isn't entirely unexpected, but she doesn't have a ready answer. What she comes up with, to her instant mortification, is “Why does that matter?”

“The well-being of my employees is important to me.” He sits back in his chair. “I'm a very caring person.”

“Uh . . . huh.”

“You all right, Callahan?”

“Honestly, sir?”

He nods.

“Honestly, this is a very stressful job.”

“Try doing it with one eye.” Fury shakes his head. “Talk to HR and get a psych eval.”

“I can do that?” Nita asks, starting to rise from her seat.

“Why not? Somebody ought to give the poor son of a bitch some work.”

* * *

It's an uncertain and uncomfortable equilibrium that they've reached, Nita and Steve and the rest of the team. She stays off the tactical missions, convinced that those more than anything are what count as “interference.” This means she sees much less of Steve and Natasha, though both of them have stopped by to make small talk with her once or twice when she's working. They don't ask if she's all right; she doesn't volunteer the information. The unspoken agreement to, well, not speak about it helps a little. At the very least it keeps Nita from getting anxious about what she's fucking up.

She misses her mom, a lot, for some reason. She keeps thinking she sees Betty in reflections in store windows, or idly thinking about calling home to say hi before remembering she can't. It's weird.

The main thing that puzzles her is why Fury still hasn't ended her contract. Sure, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s R&D department could probably spend the rest of their lives pulling information out of the Chitauri tech and finding applications for it. But at this point, they can do that on their own. Nita's work has mostly become sitting in the back while the scientists do their research, just in case they want to ask her a question. Sometimes -- okay, frequently -- she feels like a seventh wheel.

She has more time to focus on work in New York, at least, which is good because soon it'll be spring, and there will be young wizards using the summer break to explore their wizardry, and workings with S'reee and Rhiow and Aisha that need upkeep, and she and Travis are going to have to start talking about whether they're renewing their lease or what.

But that's soon, not now. Now it's the worst part of winter, the point where both DC and New York are cold and gray and wet and just generally gross, and the days may be getting longer but the sun still sets too early, and summer feels like something that happened to someone else in a book you read years ago. The weather does not improve Nita's dreary mood.

“Everybody complains about the weather,” Jasper Sitwell jokes to her one day in passing, “but nobody does anything about it.”

Nita sighs. “Well, sometimes there's nothing you _can_ do.”

* * *

The invite appears in her inbox one morning, and Nita stares at it for a long time, convinced there's been some kind of mistake. But, no, that's her name at the top -- Juanita L. Callahan -- and it does in fact say "Stark Tower," and "cocktail attire," and "welcome to bring one guest," and what the hell is going on here?

She hems and haws about it for a while, but finally she calls Steve.

"I didn't even know Stark remembered who I am."

"You worked together for a week."

"Yeah, but he's Tony Stark, he works with lots of people."

"Not many at S.H.I.E.L.D."

Nita makes a face and an annoyed sound. "Are you going?"

"I think I have to," Steve says, maybe a little wry. "The Avengers together, putting a public face on ties between Stark Industries and S.H.I.E.L.D., all that."

"You sound like you're quoting."

"Nick hand-delivered my invitation."

Nita laughs. "So you're going."

"Yeah. Are you?"

She hesitates. "Stark kinda rubs me the wrong way."

"He has that effect on people. Most of it's bluster."

"Not all of it. I don't think I've ever met someone as genuinely certain of their own superior abilities. Maybe my sister, once upon a time."

Steve chuckles. "His heart's in the right place."

"Yeah, I know. Maybe I'll bring Dair and see if they get along or just try to one-up each other all night."

"You should."

A moment of empty air on the phone line. "Is Natasha going?"

"No, I don't think so. Some kind of issue with her cover. I don't know all the details."

"Right. So who's your plus one?"

"Don't have one." She can hear the shrug in his voice.

"You should take Darcy. That intern?"

Steve lets out a short, surprised laugh. "Yeah, maybe. I'll think about it. So you're going?"

"I guess so. I mean, I can practically walk to Stark Tower from here. And how many people get invited to a party like this in their lifetimes?"

"Good," says Steve. "I'll see you there, then."

"We'll keep each other entertained," Nita promises.

As soon as they hang up, she makes her next call.

"Carmela? I have like a Defcon Four fashion emergency."


	13. Office Parties

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The fanserviceiest of all chapters. No apologies, no regrets.
> 
> Also, another vote of thanks to batyatoon for the beta!

"Do you think he has any of the suits here?"

Dairine made Nita repeat the invitation to attend Stark's party in the Speech, apparently unable to believe that her sister, her sister, had made it into the guest list. Once assured that this was, in fact, really happening, she yelled to Roshaun that she was going back to Earth pronto. As she ended the call Nita could hear the beginnings of one of the arguments that seem to be Dairine and Roshaun's favored form of communication.

"He destroyed a bunch of them at Christmas, remember?" Nita points out. "Anyway, I think his main workshop is Malibu."

"Doesn't mean he couldn't have any here."

"Dair, please do not get us kicked out of the party by snooping around looking for Iron Man version 17.7 or whatever."

"I won't snoop, I'll just ask."

Nita sighs. "Hey, where's Spot?" Dairine is wearing a jade green dress that Nita suspects has a little wizardry woven into it; Wellakh has given Dair much better fashion sense than Nita has herself. The cloth of the dress shimmers slightly even when no light is falling on it, and the train of the skirt falls in a perfect peacock-like fan no matter how Dairine moves. It's beautiful, but very pocketless, and Dairine's bag isn't big enough for a laptop.

At the question, though, the bag rustled and a rounded corner pokes up from inside. " _Hi,_ " says Spot.

"Hi. Are you a tablet now?"

"He's convertible," Dair explains. "His keyboard pops off."

"He's smaller, too. You look good, Spot."

" _Thanks._ " The computer burrows back into the bag.

The block around Stark Tower has been cordoned off, and the closer they get the more security people there are. Nita has to show her invitation and ID several times before they even get to the elevator. After the second time she starts handing the guards her S.H.I.E.L.D. badge along with her driver's license. What's the point of having connections if you don't use them occasionally, after all?

The actual party is in the ballroom on the fifth floor. They ride up the elevator in the company of a three men and another woman, all of whom look vaguely familiar, as if Nita's seen their faces on magazines or the Internet. Nita thanks her lucky stars that Carmela was able to score her a dress that makes her look as well-off as the other guests: she has a creeping feeling that she's going to embarrass herself before the night is over, but at least it won't be because she looks like she walked here from a cramped Garment District apartment.

Somewhat to her surprise, when they reach the ballroom, Nita recognizes a couple of people. Darcy is there, in company with a petite woman who introduces herself as Jane Foster. Nita and Dairine exchange identical looks of _holy SHIT, THAT Jane Foster?_ as they shake hands. Agent Sitwell is there, too, looking very dapper in his tux; Nita only spots his earpiece because she knows to look for it.

There's also a tall, slim redheaded woman in gray that almost makes Nita's heart stop.

When she turns around, Nita shakes herself and puts on a smile. Virginia Potts doesn't actually look much like Betty Callahan, aside from the height and the hair. Nita's just been in a weird mood. It's fine. She's fine.

"Thank you so much for coming," Potts says when she makes her way over to Nita. (Dairine is still fangirling over Dr. Foster.) "You're...?"

"Nita Callahan. I worked with S-- Mr. Stark at S.H.I.E.L.D., briefly."

"Oh, you're the consultant," Potts says, with a grin of recognition that might be a very good polite fake but might be genuine. Nita legitimately can't tell; she'll put her money on genuine for now, though she can't imagine why Potts would have a reason to know who she is. "How do you like S.H.I.E.L.D.?"

"It's . . . an experience," Nita decides. "Not like anything I've ever done before. But I'm only part-time there, really."

"What do you do the rest of the time?"

"I live here in New York, actually. I do translation work for a few companies."

"Live translation?"

"You mean interpreting? No, no, just text, for websites and stuff." It feels very -- small, very entry-level and unimpressive, but Potts nods as if it's just as interesting as anything she's heard from her more illustrious guests tonight. Still, Nita changes the subject. "The tower is really beautiful."

Potts grins. "Thanks. We've been working hard on it."

"The battle didn't damage the power system, did it?"

"--No," she says, blinking but recovering quickly. "Not fundamentally. There was some structural damage, but -- you'd have to ask Tony about the scientific side of things."

"The self-contained power thing is just really amazing," Nita says with a sheepish grin. "I'm really hoping it's scalable."

"You'd have to ask Tony," Potts says again, and now Nita is pretty definitely sure her smile is genuine, "but we're hoping so, too. Have you seen him yet?"

"Nnno."

"I'll let him know you came." Someone catches her eye, and she waves. "Oh, I have to -- excuse me. It was lovely meeting you, Nita."

"Yeah, of course, you too." She smiles as Potts goes off to circulate, a little more at ease. How someone that socially adept ends up in a long-term relationship with Tony Stark is a mystery to her. They must be good for each other. Now, where did Dairine--?

"Nita?"

She turns, and Steve Rogers gives her a relieved grin, and Nita reminds herself it's rude to stare and then decides screw it, when people dress up they expect to get stared at. She's never seen Steve in an actual military uniform before, let alone in his dress blues, and the metal and ribbon and lacquer on his chest alone is worth staring at.

Obviously conscious of where her gaze is, Steve's smile goes crooked. He stands to attention, giving her a salute. "Ma'am."

"Oh my god, don't," Nita laughs. "At ease, stand down, belay that, whatever. You look great." And he does, in his dark blues and gold shine and trim tailored lines.

"So do you," he returns, gesturing at her dress. "Blue's a nice color on you."

"Likewise, I'm sure."

Steve looks like he's about to make a joke, and changes his mind. "How are you?"

"I'm -- good," Nita says, and it's true as she says it. "I'm glad to see you. How're you?”

Steve takes a deep breath, settling his shoulders, and gives her a wry smile. “Glad to see a familiar face.”

Nita ducks her head with a grin, and then nods towards the bar. “C'mon. Wanna grab a drink?”

It's so much easier to navigate the party with Steve hanging out with her. Part of this is probably because he's, well, Captain America, and he siphons off a lot of attention. Nita is impressed at how good he is with people: quiet and polite and generally charming, not exactly at his ease all the time but – competent.

At one point, they're watching a few people dancing in front of the live band, and Nita asks off-handedly, “Do you dance?”

It takes way too long for Steve to answer. When Nita looks around at him, concerned, he's looking into the middle distance, his expression very far away.

“Not really. I had a partner once. Still owe her a dance.”

“Sorry,” Nita murmurs.

After a moment, Steve blinks and gives her a sidelong smile. “It's okay.”

“Nita!”

They both look up in time to see Dairine barreling towards them, her skirt practically floating out behind her with how fast she's coming. “Nita, Spot wandered off!”

“You lost Spot?”

“I didn't _lose_ him, I put down my purse and he wandered off!”

“Your sister?” Steve asks.

“Yeah, this is Dairine. Dairine, this is Steve.”

“Hi, yeah, have you seen a computer wandering around?”

“A . . . computer?”

“It's complicated,” Nita says. “He's a little--” She gestures to indicate Spot's size. “Tablet. He's sentient.”

“Okay,” Steve says, blinking.

“Someone's gonna step on him.” Dairine gnaws on her lip. “He never just goes off like this.”

“Can he talk to other computers?” Steve asks.

The Callahans both turn to look at him. “Yeah?”

Steve looks thoughtful, and nods towards one of the side doors out of the ballroom. “C'mon.”

His instincts turn out to be good. In one of the quiet halls leading to the bathroom, they find Spot leaning comfortably against the wall, directly under a touchscreen. Nita and Dairine exchange glances, Nita mystified, Dairine intrigued.

“Spot!” Dairine bends to pick him up. “What were you doing wandering off?”

“ _Making friends,_ ” Spot says. He sounds faintly aggrieved, although Nita always has trouble gauging Spot's emotional state.

“ _I do apologize,_ ” comes a disembodied voice, British and male. Nita jumps. Dairine nods at the touchscreen, wide-eyed. “ _I hope we haven't caused you any alarm. Are you this machine's owner?_ "

“I'm his person,” Dairine says. “Who're you?”

“ _JARVIS, miss._ "

“Stark built him,” Steve puts in, leaning up against the wall with his hands in his pockets.

Dairine's jaw drops. “You're Tony Stark's AI?”

“ _That is correct, miss._ ”

“Oh my god. Oh my _god_. _Where_ is this Tony Stark and _why_ haven't I met him?”

“ _Shall I inform him that you wish to speak with him, miss?_ ”

“That's probably not necessary,” Nita starts, but Dairine flaps a hand at her.

“ _Yes_ , tell him I want to meet him, I mean don't pull him away from the party or whatever, I'm not in a hurry, I want to talk to _you_. I'm Dairine Callahan, it's nice to meet you, can you tell me everything about your specs?”

“ _A great deal of my technical specifications are locked to authorized users only, I'm afraid, Miss Callahan._ ”

“No snooping,” Nita warns. “I'm going back to the party. If I see Stark, I'll tell him you're interviewing his AI.”

“Yeah, yeah, I'll come find you in a little.”

Shaking her head and grinning, Nita turns to Steve, who straightens up. He gives her an ironic smile in return, and they head back towards the ballroom.

The evening wears on. Steve gets pulled away by someone who wants him to meet someone else. Nita runs into Darcy and Dr. Foster again and ends up in an involved discussion of the best places to get burgers in New York and its environs. Against all odds, it seems, she's enjoying herself.

And somehow or other, Nita finds that it's nearly midnight, and people are leaving. She spots Steve in the thinning crowd and waves to him. He starts towards her, and reaches her moments before Virginia Potts does. Potts is frowning slightly.

“Hi, Nita -- hey, Steve. Have you seen Tony?”

Nita shakes her head. “Not all night. And now I can't find my sister. My height, red hair, green dress?”

“I haven't seen her.”

“She was talking to JARVIS, but that was a while ago.”

Potts' eyebrows shoot up. “She was talking to JARVIS?”

“She's, uh, kind of a computer buff.”

“Hm.” Potts purses her lips thoughtfully. “Come on.”

She leads them to an elevator, and in the car, she becomes a little more the hostess she was earlier, turning to Nita with a small smile. "Did you have a good time?"

"I did, thanks. Thank you for inviting me. It was totally unexpected."

"That's kind of our stock in trade around here. How about you, Steve?"

"I had a fine time, ma'am." He smiles. "Hope I didn't embarrass S.H.I.E.L.D. any."

"I'm pretty sure they'll survive," Potts says, dry. "You're all set up in your room?"

"You're staying here?" Nita asks.

"Didn't seem to make much sense to ship me back to DC in the middle of the night."

" _I beg your pardon, ladies, Captain. Mr. Stark and Miss Callahan are expecting you_ ," JARVIS interjects. " _At least, I announced your arrival. They're rather deep in conversation with me._ "

"How many conversations can you have simultaneously?" Nita asks.

" _We have not yet determined an upper limit to the number of times I can split my attention,_ " JARVIS says, a touch smug. " _Although my reaction times do slow down slightly after a certain point._ "

"You," Nita says to Potts, "have thrown possibly the best party of my sister's life, between this guy and Dr. Foster. I'm gonna have to pry her away with a crowbar."

_Ding_. The elevator doors open into a beautiful penthouse living room. Dairine and Stark are standing next to a console at the edge of the conversation pit. Holographic displays shimmer around them, filled with code. Unless Nita's much mistaken, some of it is written in the Speech.

"Dair," Nita announces. "Party's over."

Stark and Dairine both look up at her. Stark gives Nita an accusing look and points at Dairine. "Why didn't you tell me you had a sister?"

"It didn't seem relevant?"

"Relevant? She can talk to computers!"

"Why so can I, and so can any man," Nita says, rolling her eyes, "but will they come when you do call them?" Beside her, Steve lets out a surprised laugh, which he stifles hastily.

" _Yes_ ," Stark says, as if Nita's being deliberately dense, which, okay, she kind of is. "That's kind of the point."

"Ten more minutes, Neets," Dairine says, without looking away from the displays.

"Yeah, I know that song and dance."

"Ten more minutes!"

Nita throws up her hands. "Fine. Ten minutes, Dair, then you find your own way back to Wellakh."

"Horrors," Dairine deadpans, "however will I manage. Hey, Tony, is this the algorithm you were talking about?"

"Come on," Steve says, grinning. "I want to show you something while you wait."

They say their good nights to Potts; she's smiling an amused, private smile as she waves them away. Nita wonders if it's for her and Dairine or Dairine and Stark.

Steve leads Nita down a flight of stairs to another, smaller suite, just as beautiful as the penthouse but more impersonal, clearly a guest room. There are signs that someone's staying here, though: coffee cups and glasses discarded all over the room, and a small stack of books on the table by the couch. Nita's face lights up when she spots the black-and-white cover on the top book.

"You're reading Ginsberg!"

"A little bird told me I had to. I can see what she meant." He clears his throat and starts gathering glasses. "Uh, sorry about the mess. We were talking business before the party. I'll wash these."

"It's fine," Nita assures him, but seeing that he's still collecting cups, she changes tack. "You wash, I'll dry."

The grin he gives her is that of a man who knows he's being ridiculous. They take the dirty dishes to the sink in the kitchenette, and Steve lays aside his jacket, rolls up his sleeves, and starts washing. Nita leans against the counter next to him, a dishtowel in hand.

"What do you think of 'Howl'?"

Steve takes his time with his answer, putting his head on one side. "It made me want to draw," he says finally, "but I'm not sure what. But it's wild, isn't it? A little like 'The Wasteland' -- have you read that one?"

"Yeah." Nita accepts a clean glass, towels it dry. "We spent a good week on it in college, just dealing with all the references."

"Yeah, I had to find some annotations for 'Howl.'" He hands her another glass. "I wonder if you had to be there to really get it, though. To understand the feeling of that decade."

"I don't know. The 1955 he's writing about feels an awful lot like 2005. Or 2015."

"Plus ça change," Steve muses.

"Yeah." She takes another glass, her arm brushing his along the way. "Fury said to me the other day that change is either good or bad, but I'm not sure I buy that."

Steve shakes his head. "Sometime change just is."

"Right, exactly. I guess you'd have a clearer perspective on it that I would."

He raises his eyebrows at her. "Would I?"

"I mean, so much more has changed for you than for me. The serum, and then--" She waves the dishtowel at their surroundings. "Waking up now."

"Sure," he says. "But honestly, sometimes things change from day to day that are just as dramatic as ninety years of change."

"Like?"

"Like -- aliens invade."

She snorts. "Okay, yeah, that's pretty dramatic."

He gives her a wry sideways grin. Nita returns it and bumps his shoulder with hers, on purpose this time. "Or you get a new job."

"You didn't get a better offer from somewhere else, did you?"

"No." She glances down at her hands. "No, I still haven't decided to leave S.H.I.E.L.D. You're stuck with me for the moment." _Until I hear otherwise_ , she thinks, the thought heavy but still at a distance.

"Hey," Steve says quietly, bringing her gaze up to his face. "Good. We'd miss you."

They're shoulder to shoulder, not quite leaning on each other but touching. Nita notices that even when she's wearing heels, Steve is several inches taller than her; when they're this close she has to tip her head back to see his eyes. He's very warm, too, but she knew that already.

And she thinks absently of something about gravity, and something about magnets, and something about how all the metaphors she can think of right now are things you express with equations or things she learned in chemistry, something about covalent bonds, something about solar systems.

Steve murmurs "Do you--?" and Nita breathes "Yeah," because that's all the space there is for words, just a breath, and the kiss is months in the making and moments in itself and warmer and sweeter than any of the metaphors Nita had in her head.

Steve is a little clumsy when he kisses. Nita doesn't mind: she has never known a first kiss where both parties could figure out what the hell to do with their noses. The next one will be better, she decides, partly because Steve has one still-wet hand on the back of her shoulder now and partly because she has a hand on his jaw so that they can hold each other in just the right position. God, he's _solid_ \-- he could probably pick her up with barely any effort -- and he smells like clean skin. Maybe a little aftershave.

The next kiss _is_ better, and the next one's even better because he touches her with a hand on her bare neck and the other sliding down her back to her hip. She can't overhear his body, which she finds momentarily disappointing until she goes back to focusing on how he feels leaned up against her like this.

They break apart, lean back enough to catch their breath and look at each other. Nita lets out a puff of laughter at Steve's hopeful expression.

“Was that okay?”

“It was awesome,” Nita says, running her fingers through the short hair at the nape of his neck.

“--Really?”

“ _Steve_ ,” Nita laughs, and then they're kissing again, with less hesitancy from Steve this time, which is nice, and she feels warmer and safer than she has in weeks, and just like that, just from thinking how she hasn't felt this right since the night at the pub, just like that she's afraid.

She doesn't break the kiss. If anything, she clings tighter, wrinkling his bright white dress shirt with her grip, until the kiss ends naturally. But she must be tense, or look strange, because when Steve pulls back, he goes from smiling to frowning in a heartbeat.

“What is it? What's wrong?”

“This is . . .” Nita swallows, looking down, smoothing out the wrinkles in his shirtfront. “Maybe this is a bad idea.”

“Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” she says, firm, looking up at him. “No, you didn't. I just don't want to make a mistake.”

Which was the _absolute_ wrong thing to say, from the hurt look in his eyes. Nita winces. “Not that you're a mistake, that's not what I meant, fuck, that's not -- that's not what I meant.”

Steve lets go of her. The air feels very cold against her, after the warmth of his hands. “So what did you mean?”

“I . . .”

Steve gives her a close look, and then shifts his weight away from her, resigned. “Let me guess. You can't tell me.”

Nita feels a flare of anger -- at herself, at It -- and tamps it down. “There are a lot of reasons, Steve, not just--”

She breaks off. Steve waits a moment, then finishes for her, “Not just the guy at the bar?”

“We work together, too, I mean, it could get awkward.”

“What is going _on_ with him, Nita?”

“Steve, I can't tell you.”

“And you can't kiss me, either.”

“I don't know. I don't know!” _Something is going on with you and I have to stay out of it_ , she wants to say, and she can imagine the response: _I have a right to know if it involves me_. “I'm sorry. I'm really, really, _really_ sorry, but right now I just -- I just can't risk it."

Steve watches her for a moment, his eyes hard, and then blows out a breath. “Look, tell me this: you said he didn't threaten you. Did he threaten me?”

Nita hesitates -- agonizes. Every option looks bad. If she tells him what's going on, that'll be seen as interference for sure. If she says she doesn't know what's going on, would Steve even believe her? If she says she can't say, will he ever trust her again?

“Do you want the truth?” she finally asks.

“For God's sake, Nita, _yes_.”

“The truth,” she says, low and fast, “is I don't know all of what's going on, and I don't know if you're in danger, not exactly. And most of what I do know I can't talk about. What I do know is that I like you, I like you a lot, and you have more potential to do good in this world than practically anyone else I know, Steve, and if I jeopardized that I don't know how I'd live with myself.” A breath. “That's the truth.”

There's a long silence after she stops. When Steve finally breaks it, his voice is quiet, almost expressionless. “And kissing me would jeopardize that.”

Nita swallows. “That's what I'm afraid of.”

“So where does that leave us?”

Another deep breath. “Not much of anywhere, it seems like.” She rubs her face. “It wouldn't be fair to -- to pursue anything with you. Not right now.”

“'Not right now,'” he echoes. “Then when?”

“I don't know.”

“That's not real fair either.”

“Yeah,” Nita says, soft. “That, I know.”

“Glad we're on the same page about something.”

It's weird to hear Steve Rogers sound bitter, even if it's only an undertone, even if mostly he just sounds sad.

“I'm sorry,” she repeats. “I should probably go. I -- I wish I could say something to make it better.”

“You could let me know if things change.”

Nita looks up at him. “I will -- but you shouldn't wait for me, or anything. You've done enough waiting.”

“That's up to me.”

She's not sure if he means it as a reprimand, or if she just hears it as one. She nods. “Yeah.”

There is no way at all that she can think of to end this conversation gracefully, so she leaves it at that, and turns and walks out of the suite without looking at Steve, and goes to tell Dairine she's leaving. It's a small mercy that Dairine and Stark are still so engrossed in discussions of AI that neither seem to notice that she's upset. Or maybe her poker face really is getting better. 

JARVIS doesn't talk to her on the elevator ride to the ground floor, except to say “ _Good night, miss_ ,” as she exits.

Outside, Nita pauses on the sidewalk and looks up at the moon, at the reflected light of the sun that the Lone Power once snuffed out. It's come at her so many times, directly and indirectly, and she's always figured out a way around it. She's been cleverer than It, or there's been a spell she could do, or someone came to help her. But there's no help coming this time. There's nothing to do. And her impotence in the face of Its machinations -- her enforced inaction and silence -- is as infuriating as any direct attack It's ever launched on her.

“Were you watching that?” she demands of the sky. “I'm out of it. I'm leaving him alone. So are you happy? Are you fucking _happy?_ ”

It's New York City; the sight of a woman in a cocktail dress berating the moon after midnight draws a few dubious stares, but no comments.

At least this is a resolution, of sorts, she tells herself. No more avoiding the subject. Steve knows where she stands: apart. And he knows she wouldn't be there if she could help it. And -- thank every Bright Power -- he didn't push her on whether she could help it.

If she weren't a wizard, she would think she imagines the chuckle in the wind that blows around her.


	14. Upper Management

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay but FOR REAL this time, there are spoilers for Cap 2 in this chapter. Actual events-that-happen-in-the-movie-that-will-ruin-plot-points-for-you-if-you-haven't-seen-it spoilers.
> 
> There is also discussion of a character's death, and some skeevy male-female power dynamics. Hooray!

Winter turns to spring, and the cherry trees turn soft and pink; spring turns to summer, and DC turns to an absolute hellhole of humidity.

“Why is this our capital city?” Nita complains to Hill in the woman's bathroom one day, trying to make her hair look less limp.

“You don't think a swamp that makes people miserable is an appropriate setting for Congress?”

“I think it's not an appropriate setting for human beings, period.”

“So . . .”

“No, not even Congress.”

Not that New York is notably better, given that her apartment's air conditioning has gone out, and no amount of talking to the window-mounted unit can coax it into functioning again. Which would be annoying at the best of times, but is especially frustrating when Nita is already feeling less than useful.

Consulting with some of the younger wizards in Manhattan is a positive relief, all things considered. When the upper Manhattan Advisory was tied up with bridge maintenance, a twelve-year-old from Harlem called her up in a panic about creating a blizzard in his building's elevator shaft. A high school sophomore came to her uncertain about spelling their name; Nita helped them find the right Speech terms to express _how is gender supposed to work, anyway?_ and gave them some more Earthbound resources to back up the use of the singular "they" in case their teachers gave them a hard time.

Hardest of all, a nine-year-old took the Oath, matter-of-factly told her parents, and Nita ended up in a two hour phone call trying to explain to them just what their daughter had undertaken. _Even saints have to start somewhere_ , she told them, the most confident thing she said in the whole conversation.

Only crib from the best, right?

* * *

 

She wakes up in DC early one morning, after a night of unpleasant dreams. Starfish featured heavily, she remembers that, an unsettling, creeping wave of them coming out of the sea. She gropes around for her phone to record the dream, and finds an email waiting for her.

> _From: Maria Hill_   
> _To: shield-blank_   
> _Subject: Sad News_
> 
> _It is with deep personal regret that I inform you of Director Nicholas Fury's death. Director Fury died suddenly late last night. Each of us not only grieves at the passing of a tremendous individual but also for the loss his family suffers._
> 
> _Non-essential personnel and staff below Clearance Level 4 are invited to stay home today. If you have any questions, please contact your departmental supervisor. Normal operations will resume tomorrow._
> 
> _Counseling services will be available to any staff that wish to make use of them as we mourn a great leader._
> 
> _Maria Hill_   
> _Acting Director_

Nita stares at the phone, murmurs a blank "Oh, my god." She has no idea how she feels, how she should feel. They didn't exactly know each other well. She likes -- liked -- Fury, in his way, and she thinks he liked her too, in his way. He trusted her, sight unseen, to come into his organization and work on high clearance stuff. He even trusted her to go on the tac team missions, more or less.

And he's dead? It seems impossible. It always seems impossible, though.

_Does this mean it's over?_ she thinks. _Did It win?_

The answer to that, of course, is that It did – if not the bet, It won that battle. It wins most of that kind of battle. And knowing Fury, Nita doubts that that vague "died suddenly" means what it usually does in these kinds of announcements. Fury's the kind of guy who'd go out with a bang, not a whimper.

This feels unfinished, though. Unresolved. Or is it only in herself she feels like there are loose ends?

She opens a blank note on her phone and types in what she remembers of her dream, processing, thinking more about the email than starfish. Should she go into work? She's non-essential personnel, that's for sure, even if her official clearance level is 5.

She wonders if she should call Steve. She doesn't have Natasha's number, or she'd call her.

Finally, she emails Hill a one-line reply: _I'm so sorry to hear this. I'll be in this morning. Please let me know if we need to discuss my future at the agency._

Fuck non-interference. S.H.I.E.L.D. is closing ranks, and she's part of those ranks, whether It likes it or not.

* * *

 

The atmosphere at the Triskelion is unsurprisingly tense, even though operations seem to be rolling along more or less as normal. Hill hasn't replied to Nita -- also unsurprising. If she's just been promoted to acting director, after all, she must have more on her plate than one contractor's research work.

The techs Nita normally works with mostly seem to have accepted the invitation to stay home, though. Nita wanders through the labs briefly, but with no one around to work with -- or even just to gossip with -- she ends up back in her usual conference room "office," going through work emails and reports.

It takes her a few minutes to notice the commotion in the hallway. Maybe "commotion" is a strong word. But all of a sudden she realizes that there are a lot more agents striding past than there were a few minutes ago, all with intent looks on their faces, some in low, urgent conversation.

Frowning, she half-closes her laptop and goes to the door, poking her head out into the hall. "Hey," she says to one passing pair, "what's up?"

"Security breach," one woman says over her shoulder. "You should stay put."

"Can I help?" Nita starts to say, but they're long gone.

"Juanita Callahan?"

" _Nita_ ," she corrects with a sigh, turning to see who's addressing her. Another pair of agents, both men, neither of whom she knows, are coming towards her. She blinks. "Yes?"

"Could you come with us, please?"

". . . Why and where?"

"Security's been breached."

"Yeah, I heard." She glances down the hall. "Someone told me to stay put."

"The building's going into lockdown," says the agent on the left -- pale-haired, well-built, named Charleston according to his badge. "We need you to come with us."

The other agent, Franklin, equally well-built and fair but older, doesn't say anything, but he watches her with the close focus of a man who's got a lot of things to get done and is not going to brook delay.

". . . Okay," Nita says. "Can I get my stuff?"

"Quickly," Charleston says.

She steps back into the room -- they follow her -- and collects her laptop, notebook, and bag. Normally she keeps her notebook in her otherspace pocket, but with these two watching her, she finds herself unwilling to do anything out of the ordinary. The notebook goes in the bag.

They escort her at a brisk walk to the north tower of the building. From there, they ride the elevator up to nearly the top floor in silence. By now Nita is certain this isn't standard lockdown procedure. So what the hell _is_ it?

Neither man looks inclined to answer questions. Nita hangs onto her bag a little more tightly.

They lead her to an empty office -- Nita feels a brief, irrational pang of irritation that they had a real office sitting around unused this whole time and she never got to use it -- and Franklin takes her bag. Charleston holds out a hand. "I'll need your phone, too."

"Why?"

"Lockdown procedures, ma'am. Until we've determined what's going on we can't have any outgoing calls coming from here. Too much chatter confuses things."

"Uh-huh." _Bull_ _shit_ , she thinks. "I want to call my dad, just to let him know I'm okay."

"There's nothing to be scared of," Charleston tells her, with put-upon patience. "You can call him once this is all cleared up. Right now I need your phone."

It was worth a shot, anyway. Nita hands over the phone and walks into the office. Floor-to-ceiling windows on one side, solid opaque walls on the other three; a desk, a chair, empty bookshelves and an empty wastepaper basket.

They don't lock the door behind her, but she imagines she's not going to get very far if she opens it herself.

For a second after the door shuts behind her, Nita almost panics. She's been in worse situations, technically, situations where she was about to die, where she couldn't use wizardry. But there's something deeply disturbing about two regular people, two baseline humans, taking her to an anonymous room to -- do what? Lock her up? Interrogate her? About what? Is she about to get extraordinary renditioned?

The fear hits her like a wave, starting at the top of her head and rolling down her spine and stomach and legs, and away. She tells herself to breathe through it, because there's no way she can fight it. And once it's done, it's done.

Okay. Time to strategize.

They took her bag. They took her phone. Fine. They're probably searching the bag, but she doesn't think they'll find much, certainly nothing incriminating. (But what could she be incriminated about?) If they break into her phone they could find  . . . Lots of stuff, she supposes, the stuff that she jokes the NSA already knows. Her wizardly stuff is either hidden behind Speech-based passwords or spelled like her manual to look innocuous to non-wizardly eyes. 

What the hell do they suspect her of?

The agents outside can't see her, she's pretty sure, and she can't spot any cameras in the room. This isn't an interrogation cell, after all, it's an office. To be on the safe side, though, she sits down at the desk and reaches into one if the drawers to open up her personal claudication pocket. If anyone is watching, somehow, it'll look like she pulled a book out of the drawer.

She opens the manual on her lap, tucks her hair behind her ears, and whispers, "Message for Kit."

_Recording_ , the manual flashes.

"Hey, Kit," Nita says. "There's some weirdness going on for me. If you don't hear from me in a couple of hours, send the cavalry. Okay? Thanks. End message."

_Send?_

She purses her lips. "Save. Let me see a tracking spell."

The manual presents a selection of tracking spells. She picks a lightweight one, plugs her name into the appropriate blank spot, activates it, and attaches the whole thing to the message. "Send that."

_You're getting paranoid_ , Nita, she tells herself, as the manual flashes _Sent_.

_I'm being held in an office by an extralegal agency that tried to cut off my ability to contact the outside world_ , she retorts to herself. _It's not paranoia if they're actually out to get you._

Well, she's done what she could. She opens the drawer, opens her claudication, and returns her manual. That's something she'd rather keep to herself. And that leaves her nothing to do but wait.

Ten minutes turn to twenty, to thirty. Nita wonders if boredom is an interrogation tactic. When a knock finally comes in the door, she jumps.

". . . Come in?"

The door opens. The man who comes in first is unfamiliar: in his sixties, bespectacled, with a square face that must have been very handsome before stress and entropy took their toll. Behind him is Jasper Sitwell. Sitwell looks like he's keeping hold of his temper, but only just. The other man looks more worried than anything. Determined, but worried.

Nita decides to stay seated behind the desk. It feels like a position of power -- illusory power, but she'll take what she can get.

"Miss Callahan?" The older man moves forward, holding out a hand.

"Yeah." Nita hesitates, but reaches up to shake his hand.

"Alexander Pierce. I'm S.H.I.E.L.D.'s representative on the World Security Council. I'm glad to finally meet you." He gives her a rueful smile. "Wish it could've been under better circumstances."

"Yeah. Can you explain what's going on?"

Sitwell takes up a position at the corner of the room, his hands clasped in front of him. Pierce purses his lips and perches on the edge of the desk next to Nita, pretty far into her personal bubble. She leans back in her chair, unnerved.

"Director Fury hired you as an independent contractor, correct?"

"Yeah."

"And you heard about his death?"

She nods. "I got the email."

"You did, good. Sometimes those sorts of things don't get to everyone." He sighs. "Did you know Nick well?"

"No," Nita says slowly. "We talked a few times, when he hired me, progress reports, stuff like that. We weren't, like, friendly."

"What kind of work did he hire you to do?"

Nita blinks. "Consulting."

"About?"

What the hell is going on? "The Battle of New York. I live in Manhattan." Not enough information. "I have a lot of experience with, I mean, I'm good at biology and I was there at the battle, so I was -- am -- helping study the Chitauri."

Too much stammering. Pierce's eyebrows are just slightly raised, as if he finds her curious. Nita takes a long, slow breath through her nose, trying not to look like she's taking a deep breath, and thinks _How would Natasha handle this? Be like Natasha._

"So what's going on here?" she asks, meeting Pierce's eyes. "Are we renegotiating my contract? I understand, I mean, I was Fury's hire."

Pierce shakes his head. "No, I'm afraid things are . . . a little more complicated than that."

Nita raises her eyebrows (wishing she could raise just one, a la Nat) and waits.

After a moment, Pierce sighs again. "Nita -- can I call you Nita? -- what I'm going to tell you needs to stay within this building. Can I trust your discretion?"

"Yeah. Yeah, of course."

"Nick Fury was murdered."

Nita's eyes widen. No artifice required. Sure, she suspected as much, but--

"By who?"

"We're working on that. Actually, it's possible you can help." He hugs his elbows, looking down at her with a fatherly kind of look. "Nita, what's your relationship with Steve Rogers like?"

"--What?"

"See, here's the thing, Nita." Pierce leans towards her slightly. "Nick was at Captain Rogers' apartment when he was killed. Now, we have no reason to think Captain Rogers was involved, at the moment. But he knows something about what happened, and he refused to tell us. He's fled the facility." His mouth quirks up in an ironic smile. "Not the kind of thing a man with a clear conscience does."

"There has to be some kind of mistake," Nita says, aghast. "Steve's not -- not a murderer, or a conspirator or something. He's not like that."

"You're close to him?"

Nita swallows. "I -- not really. I mean, we work together."

"She's lying," Sitwell snaps from the corner.

Nita sits up straighter, stung. "I don't lie."

"No need to get aggressive, Agent," Pierce says, holding a quelling hand towards Sitwell.

"She and Rogers are friends."

"Is that true?"

"We were friendly, yeah," Nita admits. "But we kind of had a fight recently. After Stark's party," she adds for Sitwell's benefit. "We haven't spoken much since then."

"What was the fight about?"

"Stupid interpersonal stuff. That's all. It -- it was dumb, but everyone's feelings got hurt."

She's not sure they're buying it. Pierce glances at Sitwell, who shakes his head and glares at Nita. Be Natasha, she thinks, and stares back at him unblinking.

"Do you think Rogers would contact you?" Pierce asks. "He's on the run. He'll need help, places to stay. Would he call you?"

"I don't know."

"Don't lie," Sitwell snaps again, this time taking a step towards the desk.

"I'm _not_ ," Nita snaps back. "I _don't_. I don't _think_ Steve would call me, no."

"But he might," Pierce says.

Nita shrugs, sitting back in her chair with a huff. "I'm not in his head. You said he ran away from S.H.I.E.L.D. Fucked if I know what's going on with him right now."

Pierce raises his eyebrows. "All right, all right," he says, placating, and glances at Sitwell. "No need to berate the young lady, Jasper. We're all professionals here."

Sitwell backs off, his lips pressed together in a tight line. Nita feels a momentary breath of relief -- which vanishes when she realizes that's the intended effect. Jeez, does the good cop, bad cop thing actually work like that?

"Nita," Pierce says, softening his voice, "Nick was a friend of mine. We've been to hell and back together. All I want to do is find out who killed him. And I like Captain America too, believe me. I thought he was a good man."

He plants one hand on the desk and puts the other on the back of Nita's chair, swiveling her slightly towards him, leaning in. Nita leans back in the chair instinctively, feeling trapped. "But the fact of the matter is," Pierce continues, still soft, pleasant, earnest, "right now he's keeping me from getting justice for Nick. I don't have the luxury of giving him the benefit of the doubt. My friend is dead."

"I know," Nita says, her voice small. "I'm sorry."

"I'm asking for your help, Nita. You understand, don't you? You seem like a smart girl."

_Ugh. Wrong thing to say, mister_ , Nita thinks, but she nods.

"Good girl." Pierce nods back, solemn. "If Rogers contacts you, I want you to call. Do you have your phone?"

"The agents took it."

Pierce straightens finally, though he keeps his hand on the back of her chair. "Jasper, could you get Nita's phone, please?"

Sitwell goes to the door and has a brief exchange with the agents outside, and returns a moment later with Nita's phone. He smoothes the frown off his face long enough to hand the phone to her. Nita has to power up the phone from nothing, which suggests to her that they've tampered with it; it's not obvious how, though, as it seems to be functioning normally once it's on. She'll have to run some scans on it.

Pierce gives her the number to call.

"If he contacts you in any way," he repeats, watching her type, "I want you to call me. Understood?"

"Yeah."

"Nita." When she looks up at him, she notices that his eyes are almost as blue as Steve's. "I know he's charming. He seems like his heart's in the right place. But he's a fugitive, and he's standing between me and Nick's killers."

He seems to be waiting for a response, so Nita nods, tight-lipped.

"Anyone who stands in my way is going to come to regret it," Pierce finishes, his voice low. "Do you understand?"

Oh, she does. She nods again, and she doesn't have to act too hard to sound nervous when she says, "Yes, sir."

Pierce nods once, slow and satisfied, a big cat kind of gesture. He straightens up and finally takes his hand off the back of her chair. "Your help's very much appreciated, Nita. Really. Thank you."

"No problem," she mutters.

"You know, that reminds me," Pierce says, standing. "Why _did_ you come into work today?"

Nita blinks up at him, confused, and sees no reason to tell anything but the whole truth. "It seemed like the right thing to do. The kind of thing Fury would have wanted."

Pierce chuckles, nostalgic and a little sad. "He was a stubborn son of a bitch that way. Just kept on moving forward. The unstoppable force. Guess he met an immovable object."

With that, Pierce starts for the door. Sitwell gives Nita another glare -- seriously, who spat in his cornflakes? -- and follows. At the door, though, Pierce pauses and looks back at Nita with a genuine smile.

"You know, you remind me of my daughter," he says. "Bright, pretty. Gutsy. I think you could go places, Nita."

Somehow this strikes Nita as one of the creepiest things Pierce has said to her since he's walked into the room. _Be Natasha_ , she thinks, and gives him what she hopes is a pleased smile. "Thank you, sir."

Pierce leaves the door wide open so she can hear him talking to the agents in the hallway. "She's free to go."

Franklin looks into the office. "All right, miss. You're free to go."

Her smile vanishes. "Can I have my bag, then, please?"

Charleston hands it to her as she exits the office. Shoves it at her, almost. No love lost here.

In the elevator to the ground floor, she finds her hands are trembling. She shoves them in her pockets and closes her eyes. By the time she reaches the lobby, she's calm.

The wreck of roof in the lobby is a shock, though: a maintenance crew is working on sweeping up the debris littered around the space, but there's still a lot of broken glass around, and a visible dent in the floor. She spots Farhanna at the front desk and hurries over. "What--?"

"Cap," Farhanna says. Her skin looks a little ashy against the bright print of her headscarf. "Captain America. He jumped down here from the fifteenth floor when he escaped. You didn't hear?"

Nita shakes her head, not sure what her voice would do if she spoke. She skirts the edge of the lobby as she leaves.

Outside in the sun, she pulls out her phone. " _What did they do to you?_ " she murmurs to it, but it only buzzes _processing sending receiving processing_ at her. Sighing, she dials Kit.

He answers on the first ring. "Neets?"

"Hey, Kit." Her cheerfulness sounds phony.

"Is everything okay? I got your--"

"Everything's fine now," she interrupts. "I promise. I'm sorry to scare you. It was just kind of a dramatic day at work."

". . . Neets, are you okay?"

She hears a muffled voice in the background, and then somewhat more clearly, " _Is that Miss Yank herself? Nita, you better be fecking dyin'._ "

"Oh hi to you too, Ronan," she says. "I'm okay. Call off the dogs."

" _Oh, a dog, that's nice. This one rousts me out of bed and I get called names_."

"You called Ronan?"

"You said you wanted a cavalry. I figured if I didn't have a horse, I'd at least better have a horse's ass."

" _You are asking for it, mate_."

Nita swallows a bubble of laughter, a little afraid it'd come out hysterical. She seems to have a lot of adrenaline in her right now for some reason. "Look, I'll message you tonight and give you all the gory details, okay? Eight o'clock sound good?"

"Eight o'clock," Kit agrees, sounding a little dubious. "You sure you're okay?"

"I'm okay," she repeats. "I'll see you at eight."

She hangs up, trying to plan in her head what she'll tell him and what she'll have to leave out. Maybe it's time to come clean to somebody, though. She could use someone in her corner.

She hopes she can figure out a way to tell Steve she's still in his.


	15. Mandatory Breaks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains potential nightmare fuel and definite obscure metaphors! Foreshadowing~~
> 
> Uh, yeah, that's all I got.

Nita's not crazy about the idea of staying in the hotel room S.H.I.E.L.D. provided tonight, but leaving immediately seems like it's going to make her look suspicious. Maybe she's damned if she does, damned if she doesn't: when she tries to think what she would do if she were surveilling someone, the conclusion she comes to is "watch them no matter where they go." If Pierce thinks Steve might come to her for help, surely he'll be keeping an eye on her no matter where she goes.

Well, wherever she goes on Earth, anyway. Which brings her back to the other pressing question: does Pierce know she's a wizard? He's got to have some inkling. If he talks to anyone in the R&D department he'll know she can do more than she was letting on.

But Natasha kept Nita's full capabilities off the record. Did she know, or suspect, something Nita doesn't know, that she took that precaution? Pierce's threats, Steve's flight, Fury's death -- what the hell is this all adding up to?

When she opens her manual to call Kit at eight, she's decided to tell him almost everything. Even about the Lone Power and the Champion. She'll keep kissing Steve to herself, though.

The manual's "screen" flicks into life, and there's Kit -- and beside him, Ronan. Nita grins in spite of herself.

"You have no idea how nice it is to see your faces."

"There's a welcome change of tone," Ronan says. Kit reaches out and punches him in the shoulder without looking.

"Ignore him. He's just pissy that I asked him to come  _all_  the way across the pond and he didn't get to play hero."

Ronan rolls his eyes, but Nita notices he doesn't deny the accusation. She wonders if they're on-again or off-again at the moment.

"Now," Kit continues, "want to explain what exactly was going on earlier?"

"Well, the short version was I was being interrogated by my boss's boss about whether Captain America knew anything about my boss's death."

A beat of silence.

"Come again?" Ronan says.

She explains in more detail -- about Fury's death, how she found out about it, about Charleston and Franklin escorting her to the office and Pierce's questions. Ronan asks one or two clarifying questions, but mostly they listen. Nita can see the slow progression of expressions on their faces, from confusion to incredulity.

"I can see why you'd want the backup," Kit mutters.

"That's not  _legal_ ," Ronan agrees, his tone creeping towards outrage. "Not in -- _even_ in America."

Nita nods, wry. "Not sure I've got a leg to stand on, though. There  _was_ a security breach, and they didn't do anything illegal that I observed. Sketchy,” she admits, when Ronan snorts, “but not illegal. Except" -- she holds up her phone -- "I'm pretty sure they bugged this."

“Wish I was there to take a look.” Kit frowns. “I wouldn't use it for anything important.”

“Yeah, you're telling me.” She swallows. "Look, there's a complicating factor here, too."

"Complications in shady intelligence agencies?" Kit asks, with a wry smile.

"Yeah." Nita can't bring herself to smile back. "A couple months ago the Lone Power came by to see me."

Kit's smile vanishes. Ronan sits up sraighter. "It what?"

She explains, as slow and calm as she can, what It said: about humanity, about the bet, about her interference. She's gone over what It said enough times in her head, looking for loopholes, that she's pretty sure she gets it all right.

There's a tense silence when she finishes, one she doesn't like much. "So that's been freaking me out," she says, to break it.

"It's fucking with you," Kit says, flatly. "Nita, you've got to see that."

"What if It's not?"

"Are you kidding? It gave you exactly enough information for you to talk yourself into staying out of things, and you did!"

She blinks at him, stung. "So this is my fault?"

"That's not what I'm saying. This is how It works, we _know_  that. We've seen it before. _You've_  seen it before."

"Yeah. It's gunned for me before. So don't you think I might have a decent idea of what It's doing?"

Kit hesitates. Nita feels her heart thud hard, once. "Kit, just say it if you think I'm dumb enough to let myself get duped."

"I am not saying that. You're not dumb, It's just--" He rakes a hand through his hair, frustrated. "It's good at this. It manipulates people."

Nita takes a deep breath, lets it out. "Yeah. I know. I know It does. And yeah, I'm pretty sure It's happy that I'm upset. But look, It must have some kind of stakes in this, something important. It wants to win, fair and square. It could have let me stay involved and then said the whole bet was forfeit because the Bright Powers were cheating, but then It wouldn't get whatever It wants out of this, either."

"What if there's no bet at all? Do you have anything besides Its word that it exists?"

"I don't think It was lying." But her gaze flicks over to Ronan, and a moment later, so does Kit's.

Ronan's eyebrows shoot up. "Don't look at _me_. He's not in my head anymore. It's not like we're pen pals."

"But is this the kind of thing the Champion would do?" Kit asks.

Ronan shifts uncomfortably, shrugs. "Thor wrestled with Old Age because he couldn't stand being called weak. Kamsa invited Krishna to wrestle and he took on Chanura for the pleasure of the challenge." His voice has an odd quality to it -- the tone of someone relating something he remembers without ever having seen. "Athene couldn't turn down a pissing match with a _mortal_ , let alone her siblings."

There's a pause. Ronan seems like he's somewhere else for a moment, far away, and Nita doesn't dare break this silence.

Then Ronan shakes himself and looks between the two of them. "He's a proud bastard, no question. If That One tweaked him? Oh, yeah. I'd say He'd take a bet."

Nita hadn't realized what a relief it would be to hear that, to have her theories confirmed. It's like taking a drink of cold water on a hot day. Kit doesn't seem to share her feelings -- for a moment, he looks downright upset, unnerved and unhappy -- but he sets his jaw in that resolute way he has, the way he does when he's decided he's going to back someone to the bitter end, stupid or not.

Moments like this, she remembers why they dated -- why she'll always love him at least a little.

(But the set of his jaw reminds her of Steve, too, and then she's worried all over again. And at the bottom of the manual's screen, she thinks she sees Kit's hand creep into Ronan's. Good. She kind of wishes she could be there to do some hand-holding of her own.)

"So where does that leave you?" Kit asks, glancing back towards Nita. "You're staying out of the way of the bet, but what does that mean?"

Nita blows out a breath. "I'm pretty sure Steve -- Captain America -- is the Champion's representative in this. You know? He's so . . . I mean, I know you haven't met him, but he's so _good_. It's hard to explain."

"Like Darryl?"

She shakes her head. "Not exactly. He doesn't have the same -- innocence. I don't know. I don't know if he's an abdal and I don't _want_  to." Maybe that was a little too vehement for someone trying to downplay her relationship with the guy in question, she thinks, as Ronan's eyebrows go up, but neither of them call her on it. "Anyway," she continues, "abdal or not, that's my feeling. And my feeling on Pierce is . . . not good."

"Overshadowed?" Ronan asks.

"I don't think so. That'd be direct interference on Its part. I don't think It  _needs_ to overshadow that guy." She shivers. "That's the point."

"Humanity at its best and worst," Ronan mutters. Nita nods. "That's a hell of a situation you've gotten yourself mixed up in, Miss Callahan."

"Gosh, thank you for that," she says, very dry. "I never would have noticed."

That gets a wry grin out of both Ronan and Kit. Nita returns the smile. The unspoken feeling, even across the miles that separate them, is one of bravado, of good humor covering uncertainty. _Oh, Progo, it's just whistling in the dark_ , Nita thinks, the line very clear in her head for some reason.

"Are you going to be okay out there?" Ronan asks.

"I'm going back to New York tomorrow," Nita says, nodding. "I'm pretty sure they don't need me at S.H.I.E.L.D., not right now. And I don't want to be here."

"Will that be safe?"

She shrugs. "Safer than here, anyway."

"Kinda cold comfort," Kit says. "Do you want me to come out there?"

This time, her eyebrows go up. "Kit, I'm gonna be fine. I've handled worse."

"With backup."

She shakes her head. "I'll be fine."

"You promise?"

"Yeah." She quirks a smile at both of them. "I promise."

"I'll hold you to it," Kit says. Out of the corner of her eye, Nita thinks she sees Ronan squeeze his hand.

"Hey, I wouldn't expect anything less," Nita replies, soft.

When they sign off, finally, Nita feels. a pang of envy for the boys. More than a pang, maybe. It's lonely in the suite by herself -- even considering that she's probably sharing it with the eyes or ears of at least one S.H.I.E.L.D. agent.

 

When she sleeps, curled up under extra blankets, she dreams about the beach again. The sky and sand and water all seem to have been painted from the same monochrome palette; the sun is invisible behind gray clouds, and the gray sand is gritty under her feet. The sea looks flat, stretched out, taut as a drum.

"Like a tsunami is coming," she comments. A faint breeze answers her, nothing more.

Then, color, at the edge of the water, a splotch of red. She hesitates. What if she goes down to the water and the wave rolls in, crushing her, drowning her? But everything is still as a snow globe on a shelf, a held breath. Except for that spot of red, which seems to be growing.

Thinking thoughts of blood in the water, Nita walks down the beach to the tide line.

But it isn't blood at all. It's starfish, again, a dozen of them inching their way out of the water and up onto the sand. Their many arms move in slow waves, pulsing and contracting over each other. The overall effect is of a very slowly writhing rug, like one of those Escher tesselations brought to uneasy life.

" _Hey_ ," Nita says to them -- there are more, now, two dozen at least, " _you'll dry out if you come up here. You'll die._ "

" _No,_ " they say, in voices like water and slime. " _We will live. We always live._ "

Nita shivers. Four dozen now, eight dozen, doubling and doubling and doubling. When she looks down the shore in either direction, the surf is blood red as far as she can see. They're creeping up the sand. Many arms touch her toes, soft and spongy and wet. She steps back and they come sliding into the space she left.

" _Under the water,_ " they whisper, " _under the ground, under the scalp. We live._ "

"You have to leave room for everyone else," Nita insists, unnerved, still stepping backwards. She can't shake the feeling that she's going to step off of something, but she can't take her eyes off the starfish.

" _Not for you._ "

She's still walking backwards away from the tide when the dream fades away.

 _Under the water._  It follows her into her deeper sleep. _Under the ground, under the scalp. We live._


	16. Conference Calls

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More Cap 2 spoilers, obviously, but I don't think there's anything much to warn for in this chapter except spy hijinks. Spyjinks!
> 
> Thank you to mercuria for the beta!

Nita catches a plane back to New York mid-morning the next day, half-sleepwalking through the security line. They search her bag and won't tell her why. It takes an hour and two trains to get from JFK to home, and she can't shake the feeling as they pull into Jamaica station that someone has probably been following her since the airport. Maybe she should translocate the rest of the way home, but if someone _is_ following--

Her phone rings.

She stops dead on the platform, letting other travelers dodge around her, and stares. She doesn't recognize the number. Just before it goes to voicemail, she answers it.

"Hello?"

"Nita." It's a female voice, husky and familiar. "Got a minute?"

 _Natasha_.

"I'm hanging up," Nita says, and ends the call, and stares at the phone. What is she _doing?_ What _should_ she do?

When she looks around her, nobody _seems_ to be watching her, which presumably doesn't mean that nobody is _actually_ watching her. Her phone doesn't ring again. The number is sitting there in her call history, innocuous and damning.

Fuck fuck fuck.

She scrambles for her purse and digs out a pen, manages to write the number on her wrist, and then swallows. " _Hey_ ," she says to the phone. " _I'm really sorry about this, but I just can't risk this_."

And she slams it into the pavement.

 _Now_ people are watching her, although most of them only give her a sidelong glance and keep moving. One man catches her eye and shakes his head. "Feel better?"

"Nope," Nita says, and heads for the main station building, with its bathrooms and the faint hope of some privacy.

In a stall, she pulls out her manual and flips through it frantically, looking for a spell to call a standard phone instead of another manual. It takes a little digging, but she finally finds one and reads it out under her breath, plugging in the number written on her wrist at the appropriate spot. The spell manifests as small glowing display of Speech characters, scrolling and refreshing. She plucks it free of the manual and holds it close to her face, waiting as the phone on the other end rings.

She's starting to think Natasha won't answer -- she wouldn't blame her -- when the line connects.

"Who is this?"

It's not Natasha: it's an unfamiliar male voice, its tone cautious. Nita blinks and says, "Who's _this_?"

"I asked you first," whoever-it-is retorts.

"Is Nat there?"

There's just enough hesitation before he answers to give her hope. "Sorry, who?"

"Tell her Gandalf's calling."

" _Gandalf_?" he repeats, bewildered, and then Nita hears some interference as someone grabs the phone.

"Nita?"

 _That_ voice she knows. Her heart leaps, which is a phrase she thinks she never really understood until right this second. "Steve?"

"Are you okay?"

"Are _you_? Steve, what's going on?"

He takes a deep breath. "It's complicated. Where are you right now?"

"No shit it's complicated, I got interrogated by Alexander Pierce yesterday."

"You what?" Steve says, alarmed. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. I'm fine, I swear. He said you knew something about Fury and you were on the run."

"Did he." He sounds grim. "No, I'm not running from this."

Nita swallows. "What's going on?"

"A lot. You know what Hydra is?"

"The Nazi offshoot?"

"They've been infiltrating S.H.I.E.L.D. for years. Pierce is their leader."

Nita sits straight up in shock. " _What_?"

"There's more. They've been working on this weapon, it's called Insight. It's designed--"

" _What are you doing?!_ " says a voice in the background that Nita can't quite place.

" _Sitwell, shut up_ ," says Nat from nearby.

"Nat," Steve says, and then Nita hears some more scuffling, muffled voices. It sounds like he's put the phonedown. She can hear a rumbling sound -- maybe they're in a car? " _If you know something_ ," Steve is saying, " _you'd be a lot smarter to share it_."

" _You don't want her to get hurt? You think we aren't tapping her phone?_ "

Someone grabs the phone. "Nita," Natasha says, "hang up and get somewhere safe."

"I'm not on my phone!" Nita says quickly. "I'm not on my phone! I smashed it when you called me, I'm calling from my manual, they can't bug that. I didn't know what else to do. Please don't hang up."

"You smashed your phone?" Natasha repeats, surprised.

"I didn't know what else to do."

"That was smart. That was good, Nita, you did fine."

"Okay," she says, although it doesn't feel okay. "Where are you guys?"

"Outside DC. Don't worry about us. You need to get someplace safe, Nita. Where are you?"

"Uh -- Jamaica. New York."

"Are you going home to Manhattan?"

"I was -- is it safe?"

There's a pause at the other end of the phone, which is the opposite of reassuring. Nita swallows. "Nat?"

"Stay away from it for a few hours. Run some errands. Act normal."

"Oh," she says weakly, "yeah. Easy. Is my roommate going to be okay?"

"It'll be fine, Nita," Nat says, her voice warm and confident, which is what makes Nita pretty sure she's lying.

"Are you guys going to be all right? Who are you with?"

Nat laughs softly. "New friend."

" _Hi_ ," the first man's voice says, at a little distance, "Gandalf _or whoever you are._ "

"Hey, _Falcon_ , shh," Nat says away from the phone. "I need to make some calls," she continues, to Nita. "Go home in about four hours, okay?"

". . . Okay," Nita says, after a moment. "Nat?"

"Yeah?"

"Take care of Steve?"

Another pause. Nita isn't sure how to interpret this one.

"Обещаю," Nat murmurs. _I promise_. For Nita's ears only.

Nita lets out a long, slow breath. "Thank you." A beat. "I'll hang up now."

"Stay safe," Nat says, and ends the call.

 

* * *

  
Unsure what else to do with herself, Nita wanders around the neighborhood around the station for the better part of an hour -- just walking, wandering, worrying. The sky's clear over New York, the air hot and tending towards humid. She works up a sweat, and her bags feel heavier and heavier, and finally, tired but edgy, she catches the subway back to Manhattan.

On the island, she manufactures some errands to run -- groceries, bookstore -- until she can't stand the suspense anymore and catches a bus for home. Travis works afternoon shifts, so he ought not be home until evening, but she can't help worrying. He's just a normal guy; she can't expect him to deal with the possibility that freaking Hydra has her on a shit-list.

The concept of Hydra infiltrating S.H.I.E.L.D. is a little much to process, still. The fact sits there in the middle of her mind like a downed tree in the middle of the road, heavy and awkward and liable to impale you if you come at it too fast. She leaves it there and steps around it.

Sure makes sense of Its bet, though.

She had hoped that getting home would make her feel safe, the way crawling into bed used to make the shadows in her room less frightening -- but the closer she gets to her floor, the more on edge she feels. There's not exactly a good reason for it, but general paranoia seems fairly justified right now. When she gets to her door, she pulls out her manual -- finds the bookmark for offensive spells, preps a shield, and unlocks the door.

Naturally, there's nobody in the front hall. She takes a few cautious steps towards her bedroom.

"Hi, Nita."

" _Fuck!_ "

She spins, gasping out the last word of the spell. The shield snaps into place around her with a _whoomph_ of air.

At the end of the hall that leads to the living room stands Clint Barton, dressed in civvies and holding up both hands, palms out. "Woah, woah, don't blow me up!"

"-- _Clint?_ "

"Hi." He keeps his hands up. "It's okay, Nita. Nat sent me."

"What the hell are you doing here?" she says, rather louder than she intends. Her heart is going a mile a minute. "What are you doing in my apartment? How did you get in?"

"Nat sent me," Clint repeats patiently. "She told me S.H.I.E.L.D.'s been compromised and they've got you on some kind of hit list. Pulled me out of a surveillance mission for it, too, so I guess it's kind of a big deal."

"A hit list?" Nita repeats, dumbfounded. "Hydra's got me on an _actual_ hit list?"

Clint nods soberly, watching her. "You and a lot of other people, apparently. So I'm here to make sure nothing happens to you. Okay?"

Nita swallows, staring at him, trying to figure out whether or not to believe him. Maybe he can read that in her face, because he doesn't move. His eyes flick over her once, as if looking for targets or gauging the likelihood she'll attack him, then return to her face.

"Nita," he says after a few tense moments, very quiet, "I owe you one. Remember? I wouldn't let anything happen to you no matter who gave the order."

Nita takes a deep breath and lets it out as slowly as she can, which does nothing to disguise how shaky it is. "You promise?"

"Yeah, I promise." When Nita hesitates, he shrugs. "Look, Nita, you know how Natasha started working for S.H.I.E.L.D.?"

Nita shakes her head. 

"I was on assignment. I was supposed to take her out, Fury's orders. She'd been sabotaging our operations in the Ukraine for months. So, you know, a lot of stuff happened, stuff tends to happen around Nat, but it came down to her and me and only one gun between us, and me with my finger on the trigger. And I said 'Look, you're better than this, you're smart and you're capable and you could be doing way more than this, and I really don't want to kill you. What do you say?'"

"What'd she say?" Nita asks.

"Well, she's working for us now, right?" A grin flashes across his face, but he sobers quickly. "Nita, I'm not going to hurt you. I'm here because Nat asked me to come."

She wants to believe that. She really, really does, it's just--

"Is that true?"

"Would I lie to you?"

Her eyebrows shoot up. "What the fuck kind of question is that?" she says, more than a little bitter. "You're a spy. Natasha's kept tons of stuff from. Fury kept stuff from me. Pierce lied to my face. The whole organization's built on obfuscation."

"Wow, good word."

" _Clint_."

"Sorry, sorry." He ducks his head, conciliatory. "It is true, Nita. Swear to anything you like."

"On Natasha?"

The faint smile that's been lurking around his eyes disappears. "Is that what you want me to say?" he asks quietly.

She searches his face for another moment -- but it was that seriousness she needed. She takes another deep breath and shakes her head. "No. It's okay. I believe you."

"Okay. Great. Can I put my hands down now?"

She nods and speaks the word to release the shield spell. Clint puts down his hand with a huff of breath and grins at her.

"Y'know, I've never seen anyone look that scary holding a book." He considers this. "Well. Coulson, maybe."

This doesn't mean much of anything to Nita, so she shakes her head. "I wouldn't have hurt you."

"Really? 'Cause you looked pretty ready to rip me into my component atoms." She gives him a sharp look, but he's grinning. "It's a really good threat."

"I wouldn't have," she repeats. "Not unless you gave me a reason to."

"I'll behave myself."

"Yeah." She glances around the apartment. Her bags are still tumbled haphazardly behind her; she bends to pick them up. "Uh, how long are you planning on -- staying?"

Clint grows serious. "Until things are safe again. Couple of days, at least."

"Do I get any say in this?"

"Sure you do. It's your apartment. You wanna kick me out, you can do that." He gives her a close look. "But if you want backup, right now, I'm here."

"I don't know what I want," Nita mutters. "I want some coffee. You want anything?"

Clint perks up. "Coffee sounds good."

She tosses her bags into her bedroom and nods for him to join her in the kitchen. "Where's your bow?"

"Living room," he says, leaning casually against the archway into the tiny kitchen. "Your place isn't bugged, in case you were wondering."

"You searched my apartment?"

"Yyyeah," he says, as if it should be obvious.

"Spies," Nita sighs. "What'd I ever do to deserve you guys."

"I know," Clint says cheerfully. "Must've been pretty awesome, whatever it was."

  

* * *

 

". . . Nita, who's the guy on the couch?"

"His name's Clint."

"Hi, Nita's roommate."

"He's a friend of mine from DC."

"Oookay. Hi, Clint."

"He's crashing here for a couple days. I'm sorry, it was really sudden, otherwise I'd've given you a heads up."

"Hey, well, no problem. Hope you don't mind the AC's busted."

"Eh, I've slept in worse." 

 

* * *

 

Nita dreams of walking through Queens, the streets empty now, the silence as total as the vacuum of space. The moon is a crack of light in the black sky. As she walks, the tight-packed houses become dark Brooklyn brownstones, their stoops unlit and unoccupied. Nita is the only thing moving in the landscape, asleep and awake in the city that never sleeps, and it's peaceful, in its way, but lonely. Even the moon doesn't feel this lonely.

The street ends at a slow, gray river. Not the East River -- the vegetation is all wrong. She peers down into the water, wondering if she'll see red starfish, but sees nothing but the moon reflected there. In the water it is a full round coin.

The dream isn't frightening, but when she wakes up in the small hours of the night from it, she's afraid to go back to sleep.

When tossing and turning and throwing off her sheets don't help, she gets up and goes to the kitchen to get a glass of water. On a whim, she pokes her head into the living room.

Clint is sitting on the back of the couch, watching out the window. He looks up and nods to her when she comes in.

"Couldn't sleep?"

"I just . . ." She shakes her head. "I needed to make sure there were other people in the world."

Clint nods again.

"Do you mind if I sit up and read for a little while?"

"Nah." The corner of his mouth quirks up, she thinks; it's hard to tell in the low light.

She pulls a book at random off the bookshelf by the TV, turns on the lamp by the couch, and sits down. Clint hasn't even unfolded the sheets and blankets she left him.

Mostly, she doesn't read, and they don't talk, and the night lightens into dawn without fulfilling any promises.

 


	17. Response Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are so many Cap 2 spoilers here!

"So should I go to work? Try to act normal so they don't know I know?"

It's morning. Nita's tiny coffee maker is burbling away, and Clint is watching it like a -- you know, a predatory bird. Travis is still asleep. Nita envies him.

"You have stuff you need to get done today?" Clint replies.

"Not really. I wasn't supposed to be back here until tomorrow, anyway."

"Then you're probably more secure in here than out there." He shrugs, reaching for the coffee pot. "Limited points of access and all. Stay away from the windows."

Nita stares at him. "Are you serious?"

He shrugs again. "We're working on incomplete intel. If Hydra's trying to make you dead, they've got a few different options, and I'd rather just keep you away from all of 'em. So. Stay away from the windows, unless we pull the blinds. Snipers are assholes."

She gives him an incredulous look.

"What?"

" _You're_ a sniper."

"Yeah," he says, innocently.

Nita sighs. "This is going to suck, isn't it."

"Hey, I'll behave."

She shakes her head, unsure of how to explain that it's not his snark that bothers her, but the waiting; not the intrusion of having him in her home, but the necessity of it. It's not that she's not used to being scared -- she's been scared plenty of times, at the bottom of the ocean and in the depths of space. It's that there's so little she can do about it now, and she feels helpless, and she _hates_ it.

After a moment, she realizes Clint is watching her -- but when she meets his eyes, all he says is, "Can we make some more coffee?"

  

* * *

 

Thankfully, there's work she can do from home. Translation requires enough focus that she can't think about Steve or Hydra or Nat or anything but idioms. Although her brain certainly _tries_ to get her to think about them.

She's in the middle of emailing one of her clients in Japan when Travis comes into the living room.

"Hey, turn on the TV."

He sounds odd. Normally Travis sounds like a slightly stoned version of Winnie the Pooh, pleasantly easy-going. But right now he sounds -- careful.

"What's up?" Nita asks, looking up from her laptop.

"Just -- turn on CNN."

Clint comes in behind Travis, frowning, as Nita puts her laptop aside and turns on the TV. After a couple channel flips she finds the news.

_"--Potomac. We're still not sure who these crafts belong to, they don't seem to be identified--_ "

"Holy shit," Clint breathes.

On the screen, a helicopter shot shows a hole has opened in the Potomac River, water rushing down into some hidden bunker next to what's clearly the Triskelion. Some kind of enormous airship is rising vertically from the bunker. They cut to a reporter standing on a sidewalk; she's staring out of the frame, presumably at the water, with a look of consternation on her face. She startles and looks back at the camera. " _Uh -- right now we're just waiting for confirmation from the FAA that these crafts are indeed identified and registered with them. It's possible that we're looking at something akin to New York, although I wanna emphasize that this has not been confi-- oh my god!_ "

The camera swings around to point at the river. The airship has lumbered out of the water; a plume of smoke is rising from somewhere inside it. A few seconds later the rumble of an explosion reaches them.

"Clint, what's going on?"

"They're helicarriers." He comes further into the room to stand next to the couch, his gaze intent on the TV. "S.H.I.E.L.D.'s."

"S.H.I.E.L.D.'s or Hydra's?"

"Whoa, wait, what?" Travis asks.

Another explosion on the screen.

"Do you think they're in there?" Nita says, her voice strained. "Steve and Nat?"

"Maybe." When she gives him a sharp look, he presses his lips into a tight line. "Probably."

The coverage cuts to a splash screen, reminding them they're watching breaking coverage on CNN. Nita stands up, hesitates, and heads for her room to grab her manual.

As soon as her hand closes on the cover she feels another jolt of anxiety. The book is fizzing with message notifications. When she opens it, she sees Kit's name, Ronan's, Tom and Aunt Annie, even. But the first one from Dairine grabs her attention.

_CALL DAD NOW._

"Oh fuck." She slaps for her back pocket automatically, even knowing that her phone's in smithereens, and raises her voice. "I need to borrow a phone!"

When she comes into the living room, Travis is holding out his iPhone. Nita grabs it with a hurried "thanks" and dials her dad's number. He picks up on the first ring, his voice tight with strain.

"Hello?"

"Dad, it's me, it's Nita, I'm okay."

" _Nita_. Where are you?"

"I'm in Manhattan. I came back early. I'm fine, Daddy, I'm nowhere near S.H.I.E.L.D."

He sighs in relief. "Oh, thank God. What's going on?"

"I'm not totally sure--"

"Is it aliens again?"

Nita glances at the TV. Something explodes on the screen. "No, I'm pretty sure it's not. I'm pretty sure it's the government."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah."

"You don't sound very optimistic about that."

"I'm not." Another explosion onscreen. "Listen, I think I need to go."

"Are you going to DC?"

"I -- I don't know. I might have to. I don't know."

"Nita, sweetie--" That strain, temporarily banished by hearing from her, is back in his voice. "Just . . . just be careful, okay?"

"I promise. Dad, I love you."

"I love you too, sweetie. Be careful."

"I promise," she repeats. "I'll call you soon. I promise."

When she hangs up, Clint is watching her closely. "You shouldn't go out there."

"And I _should_ sit here and watch it on TV instead?"

"Are you leaving?" Travis asks, bewildered. "You're going to DC right now?"

"I'll take an express," Nita says, still staring Clint down, daring him to make an issue.

Clint shakes his head. "You're nuts. You go, I'm coming with you."

"Deal." She snatches up her manual.

"Uh, Nita, what's going on?" Travis looks more honestly confused than Nita's ever seen him -- even a little worried. For easy-going Travis, that's saying something.

She shrugs "I'm going to DC to find my friends. I'll be careful, I promise."

". . . Okay. 'Cause you still owe me for the cable bill, remember?"

"And I will pay you back the second I get home." She glances at Clint. "Come if you're coming."

Shrugging, Clint reaches behind the couch, tugs out a long flat case and slings it over his shoulder, and stands. "I'm coming."

 

* * *

 

It's about twenty minutes' walk from her apartment to Grand Central; Nita and Clint cover the distance in just under fifteen. Nita leads the way through the sparse crowd to the quiet subway platform that houses one of the patent worldgates.

"Translocation's a little weird if you've never done it," she tells Clint absently, flipping through her manual. There's a tracking spell she wants to run -- quick and dirty, but she doesn't have time for slow and precise. "But it doesn't hurt or anything. Here it is."

"Here what is?" Clint peers over her shoulder.

"I'm going to find Steve and take us as close to him as we can get. Hold on for a minute." She runs her finger down the page, making sure she knows all the information she needs, and then reads out the spell as fast as she can. She uses the most basic version of Steve's name she can: full given name, date of birth. Rank.

(In the corner of her mind that's not occupied with the spell itself, she wonders, not for the first time, whether the Speech has a sort of tonal component, like Mandarin. Do worry and affection in your voice change the meaning of the name you say?)

The spell produces a set of coordinates, with the note _Within 800m radius._ She grimaces -- searching for Steve within a circle nearly a mile across isn't her idea of fun -- but she asked for quick and dirty, and she got it. She turns to the worldgate and speaks all the necessities.

As the gate opens, she turns to Clint. On impulse, she holds out a hand to him. He eyes her for only a moment before taking it. His fingers are callused on the back of her hand.

"Just keep thinking about where we're going," she tells him. "It'll keep you focused."

Then they step into the air, and out onto the riverside.

Clint takes another step, apparently before he realizes that they've traveled, and then comes to an abrupt halt. Nita is standing stock still herself, staring. A ways down the river they can see the Triskelion, silhouetted against a pale sky. One of the towers has been torn away. In the river itself are the wrecks of three helicarriers, sending plumes of fire and smoke into the air. Here, it's quiet, but the river is turbulent. The breeze gusts for a moment; it brings the smell of hot metal and dust and fuel and the other scents of destruction over the dank brown smell of the Potomac.

Nita lets go of Clint's hand to put both over her mouth, trying to breathe through a wave of nausea. _Please don't let us be too late_ , she thinks. _Oh, Powers, please_.

Damage control. Clean-up. You're never too late to help in some way, she reminds herself -- breathes deep through her nose, straightens her shoulders.

Clint is unpacking his bow when she looks around, along with a slim quiver of arrows. "Now what?" he asks, when he catches her eye.

"Now I find them."

The tracking spell she uses this time is a little more fine-grain, directional. Can't hurry this one. She wishes she had more precise names for Nat and Steve to plug into the appropriate places, but it should work as is. Adrenaline gives her an extra push as she speaks the spell. She's still starting to feel trembly and tired at the end of it, but she ignores the feeling as hard as she can. Her manual is displaying two arrows, labeled _S. Rogers_ and _N. Romanov_ , both pulsing faintly. Natasha's keeps adjusting, moving in a slow arc.

Steve's is absolutely still.

Nita swallows. "This way."

With Clint a half step behind her, an arrow nocked to his bowstring, she follows the arrow like a sailor following the North Star. They hug the curve of the river, clambering through half-wild woods. The concrete embankment slopes down to natural riverbank after a half-mile or so, and the going gets a little easier.

"--Nita."

She looks over her shoulder at Clint, halting. "What?"

He points down the bank. "What's that?"

She follows his finger, squinting, and at first only sees a dark heap on the riverbank, some junk or something that's washed up. Then it comes into focus -- a supine body in red,white, and blue.

She breaks into a run.

She skids to a halt next to Steve and drops to her knees with a painful jolt. He's beat to hell, and Nita thinks in one brief, terrified flash that she's seen him hurt, but she's never seen him _unconscious_.

"Oh God Steve please don't be dead," she whispers. "Clint--"

Clint drops to one knee on Steve's other side and presses his fingers under the shelf of Steve's jaw. At the touch, Steve groans softly, and Nita lets out a sound that's not quite a groan herself. " _Steve._ " She puts a hand on his chest, the other on his cheek. "Steve, can you hear me?"

His lips move; he mumbles a name. There's a plosive at the beginning, an _ee_ at the end. She's not sure if it's _Peggy_ or _Bucky_.

Either way, it's a sign of life. "Clint, we need help."

"I'm on it. Can you heal him?"

Nita swallows, taking stock of her internal reserves. "I don't know."

As Clint moves off a short distance to work on calling backup, Nita starts searching the manual for a diagnostic spell, something that'll tell her how much damage Steve has taken and fix the worst of it. She wraps one hand around his, squeezing through the old leather glove. He doesn't squeeze back -- but he mouths that name again.

" _Hang in there_ ," she murmurs.

All healing spells require blood; the most powerful require the wizard's own. Clint lends her a knife when she asks, and watches as she cuts the pad of her thumb. (He looks like he can't decide whether to be weirded out or not.) She cups Steve's cheek again, as gently as she can, and starts the spell.

_\--'til the end of the line_.

That's the other thing about healing spells. The wizard takes part in the suffering of the other. It's the price you pay.

Blow after blow after blow, slamming across her face with the force of a sledgehammer -- her teeth rattle, her skin splits -- she tastes blood in her mouth -- then falling, falling like a bad dream, but one that ends with the flat hard bone-fracturing impact of water instead of tangled bedsheets. Her voice hitches in pain as she speaks the words to start the healing process on Steve's vertebrae and ribs. Those are the worst injuries, along with the concussion. She can't fix any of it entirely, as much as she wishes she could. She just doesn't have the energy.

_It's fine, Nita, I heal up pretty quick_. How long ago was that extraction mission? Six months? More? Less? (Did Gwen Tanaka survive whatever happened here? Did Dr. Cavalia? Farhanna at the front desk?)

The spell lets her go at last, leaves her shaking, with nothing but a healed cut on her thumb to show what she's done. Steve still looks like he's been through hell, but Nita imagines that he at least looks a little less pale with pain.

"EMT's on the way," she hears Clint say.

"I'll wait," she whispers.

 


	18. In-Network Coverage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Cap 2 spoilers throughout, obviously. This entire chapter takes place in a hospital, also, and Betty Callahan is mentioned.
> 
> Other than that, I think it's just self-indulgence and feels all the way down.
> 
> A thousand and one thanks to newredshoes for fact-checking movie details for me!

When the medevac helicopter arrives, there's not room for Nita on it. She watches the paramedics load him in, wishing she could say _He has a concussion, he hit the water, please be careful_. They're careful. It's fine. They're professionals. It's fine.

It's over now. It's fine. It's all going to be fine.

Right?

"Come on," Clint says in her ear as they watch the helicopter lift away. "They'll be taking him to Walter Reed. We can follow them."

The _thockthockthock_ of the helicopter fades away slowly. "Did you get Natasha? I mean, did you talk to her?"

"Yeah." She hears what she thinks is relief in his voice. "Yeah, she's okay. She's tying up some loose ends." He catches her eye, and one corner of his mouth lifts in a wry half-smile. "Lotta shit went down when we weren't looking."

"You're telling me," she murmurs, and starts looking up the coordinates for Walter Reed.

 

* * *

 

Translocating the two of them to a quiet, unobserved spot near the hospital takes the last of her energy. Clint is watching her -- unsubtly, and with concern -- as they head into the hospital. The air-conditioned indoors feels like heaven; Nita's exhale as the sliding doors close behind them is more a groan of exhaustion than a sigh of relief.

"Y'know you running yourself into the ground now doesn't actually affect what already happened," Clint points out.

Nita gives him a glower. "You couldn't have pointed that out _before_ I jumped us over here?"

"Call me crazy, but I had a feeling you wouldn't listen."

"You're too smart for your own good."

"Actually I have almost never been accused of that one before."

Nita snorts and leads the way to the front desk--

Where they run into an unforeseen snag called HIPAA.

"I can't give out information about any patients here," the man at the front desk repeats patiently. "Not without written consent from the patient."

"Right," Nita says. She sounds blank, even to her own ears. She feels dumb for not anticipating it, but it was never an issue when her mom was sick, and she just -- can't think of a response. You don't get to say _I did a healing spell on him_ and get admitting physician privileges or anything. "But I really need to see him. He's a friend of mine."

"I'm sorry."

"But I _need_ \--"

"Hey, Nita." Clint's hand lands on her shoulder. She starts. "Want me to see what I can do?"

When she nods, he presses a phone into her hand. "Here. Go grab a seat and call your dad, okay?"

"Right." It sounds like a good idea. By the time she finds a chair, though, she feels like she's lost her train of thought again. She sits there, turns the phone over in her hands, turns the whole day over in her head. It's just too many nights with too little sleep, too much uncertainty and too many roadblocks. Too little, too late, too--

"Nita?"

She jerks upright, blinking at Clint. "Hi."

He flops into the chair next to her. "So you can't see him yet -- the doctors are with him. Once they've gotten him settled in we can figure out getting in to see him."

"Do they know how he's doing?"

Clint shakes his head. Nita blows out a breath, leans her elbows on her knees, and rubs her face. "Fuck."

"Hey." Clint touches her shoulder again. "You okay?"

"I'm just so tired."

"You want to go home?"

"Not yet."

"Did you call your dad?"

She looks down at the phone, startled. "Oh. Uh, no."

"Do that," Clint advises. "It'll kill some time."

She glances over at him. He raises his eyebrows. Nita can't quite figure out what she wants to say; after a moment, she settles on, "You didn't owe me this much."

Clint cocks his head, birdlike, considering this. "Eh. Maybe not."

" _Definitely_ not. I owe you."

He doesn't quite smile, but she gets a sense that he approves anyway. "Okay."

 

* * *

 

Nita calls her dad and assures him she's all right, even if she can't give him many more details than that. She calls Kit and tells him (and Ronan, audibly demanding more information in the background) the same. (She would call Travis, but she realizes with some chagrin that she doesn't actually know his number off the top of her head.) She uses her manual to message Dairine, and Carmela, and Annie and Carl and even Darryl and S'reee, all of whom want to know if she's okay. _I wasn't even there_ , she thinks, the thought tinged with grouchiness. The fact that she doesn't know more about what happened is frustrating.

The afternoon wears on, stretched longer and longer by the tense boredom peculiar to waiting rooms. Clint leaves her to her thoughts, wandering off once and returning with a soda for her before disappearing again. It seems safe to assume he's still nearby, though. He just doesn't seem to like the ground floor.

There are muted TVs here and there around the lobby; they're all tuned to news networks. It's not until Nita sees the word S.H.I.E.L.D. on a graphic that she starts paying attention to the closed captions.

Several anchors, all looking professionally calm and objective, are discussing a leak and its implications for the leaker -- and the next election. Nita has to watch for a few minutes to pick up enough context to understand what's happened. Someone, in the midst of the chaos on the Potomac, got into S.H.I.E.L.D.'s databases and dumped every piece of dirty laundry they found onto the internet. Assassinations, domestic spying, all the Chitauri research, raids and censorship in the scientific community -- all there for the world to pick through and examine. To demand answers for.

Very slowly and carefully, Nita pulls out her manual and searches through the index for the basic informational section on the United States. When she turns to that page, she finds a large gray legend under the title:

_This section may be out of date. New information is being assimilated and collated._

When she goes to the section on the Chitauri, she finds the same note, along with a subheading that says _See also: Skrull, Kree._ The more she flips around, the more information she sees added to the manual.

Her heart's thumping in her ears when she turns to the section on Reconfiguration.

_This section may be out of date. New information is being assimilated and collated due to recently completed interforce venture in New York._

"Oh, my god," she whispers. There's a lump in her throat. "They did it."

S.H.I.E.L.D.'s been stripped of its power to spy and kill and lie. Hydra lost a foothold. Truth -- ugly and painful but true, antiseptically true -- is coming to light.

The Lone One lost the bet. She's certain of it. It told her Itself, back in December: _Victory is its own reward. Unfortunately._ The defeat of one fragment of the Fairest and Fallen here means the Unfallen has just a little more room to shine. The ripples of a victory here can only spread outwards.

Nita sniffles, realizes her cheeks are wet, and wipes away the few tears that have leaked out with the heel of her hand. They won one. They _won_ , and now she just wants to see Steve.

"You okay?"

She looks up, blinking. The man in front of her is a stranger, black with close-cropped hair and a neat goatee, carrying a bag slung over one shoulder. She gives him a smile, automatically.

"Yeah, I'm fine. I'm just really tired."

"Are you Nita?"

At that, she straightens (and tries to ignore a swell of paranoia at a stranger knowing her name). "Yeah."

He gives her a curious sidelong look. "Gandalf?"

"--Are you Steve and Nat's friend?"

"Sure am." He holds out a friend. "Sam Wilson."

"Oh. Oh, hi." She shakes his hand. "Are you okay?"

He smiles. "Don't I look okay?"

"You look fine. I just know what kind of stuff tends to go down around them. Explosions, running, bullets."

Wilson chuckles. "Ain't that the truth. Yeah, I'm okay. Got more than my daily recommended allowance of adrenaline, but I'm okay." He folds his arms, hugging his elbows. "You wanna see the Captain?"

Nita sits bolt upright. "Is he awake?"

Wilson's smile fades, and he shakes his head. "Not yet. But I can get you into his room."

"You can?" She's already standing up, grabbing her manual.

"I know my way around a hospital. C'mon."

As he leads the way to a bank of elevators, he gives her another of those curious looks. "So . . . Gandalf?"

Nita blinks, and then lets out a breath of laughter. "I don't know, they needed a codename for me at some point, and it needed to be something Steve was familiar with. He likes _Lord of the Rings_."

"And they picked 'Gandalf'?"

Nita hesitates. When the pause stretches a little too long, Wilson continues lightly, "Why not, like, 'Eowyn'?"

"Well . . . I'm scared of horses," Nita says. The question of how much Steve or Nat told this guy about her and her wizardry can wait. In the meantime, she'll just give him points for being literate, or at least for seeing the movies.

Steve's room is a few floors up. There's a guard stationed outside, rifle and all. Nita supposes that makes sense, given the room's occupant, but it still makes her nervous. Wilson has a few minutes of quiet conversation with the soldier, and finally the soldier nods. Wilson gestures for Nita to precede him into the room. She hesitates with her hand on the knob, staring at the blinds covering the window.

"You okay?" she hears Wilson ask behind her.

Nodding, but silent, she opens the door.

Steve looks much like he did when the medevac team left: beat to hell. The mud and blood have been cleaned off his face, though, and they've changed him into a hospital gown from his uniform. She hopes they didn't cut him out of the uniform; that thing's an antique.

"Any idea where his shield is?" Her voice is hushed, although she doubts she could wake him up even if she shouted.

"Bottom of the river, as far as I know."

Nita glances over her shoulder at him, appalled. "Oh, no, really?"

"Yeah." His mouth quirks wryly, an _I know, I know_ kind of expression. "He's lucky he's not down there too."

"Yeah." She hesitates another moment, then sits down on the edge of the bed. No reaction from Steve as her weight makes the mattress shift. Swallowing, she puts her hand over his where it lies limp on the covers.

Just a few hours ago she was sitting next to him, holding his hand through his gloves, and for some reason, touching skin to skin like this almost undoes her all over again. _It's gonna be okay_ , she tells herself, the thought fierce. _He's here. You're here. It's gonna be okay this time._ "Any idea how he got out?"

"Nope. You?"

"We found him on the riverbank. Maybe he got there on his own." She doubts it, though. The impact against the water was so great that even Steve Rogers should have been knocked out, if he hadn't been already in the beating he got on the helicarrier. So who got him out?

Something to worry about later.

Wilson says something quiet, and she snaps back to the room. "Huh?"

"You wanna stay here with him?" he repeats, still quiet.

"Yeah." She looks up at him, finally. "If it's okay. Do you think he'll wake up soon?"

"Tough to say. Anywhere you need to be?"

"Nope." Looking back at Steve's sleeping face, she squeezes his hand. "No place in the world."

 

* * *

 

Wilson leaves them alone, which (much later) strikes Nita as kinder than he had to be. After a while -- well, okay, after not very long, truth be told -- she moves to one of the uncomfortable armchairs next to the bed, just to close her eyes, and promptly falls asleep. What dreams she has are less precognitive and more hypnopompic, half-awake interpretations of the sounds and sights around her. The soft beeping of the monitors hooked to Steve becomes crickets in long grass under an obnoxiously bright moon.

She wakes up when Wilson comes back to the room. He gives her a quick grin and holds up an iPod. "Brought him some music. You mind?"

Yawning, she shakes her head. "Go for it."

As he sets up the iPod and some portable speakers, he adds, "You know a guy named Barton?"

"--Oh, shit, yeah. Is he around?"

"He was. He ran into me in the hall, asked me to tell you he was heading out."

"Did he say where he was going?"

Wilson shakes his head, hits play on the music, and soul fills the room. Nita raises her eyebrows. Wilson grins and cocks a thumb at the iPod. "Cultural appreciation course. Hope it's not gonna keep you awake."

"No, I'm gonna stretch my legs." And her neck. She's still got that bone-deep tiredness that comes from one too many wizardries done, but sleeping in this position is starting to wreak hell on her spine. "Are you staying?"

"Yeah. He won't wake up alone."

Nita gives him a grateful look as she stands up. "What did you say you do?"

"I didn't," he replies, with another half-grin. "I work at the VA. I do counseling."

"That," Nita says, raising her eyebrows, "explains a lot."

"If you say so. What do _you_ do?"

"What I can," she replies, heading for the door. "That's all."

She remembers this from hospitals, too: wandering down to the cafeteria, not hungry for anything but eating because you had to at _some_ point, getting decent soda or terrible coffee to keep you going. One sad sandwich and shitty cup of coffee later, she heads back up to Steve's room.

As her hand closes on the door handle, she realizes she can hear low conversation inside. She hesitates, then knocks. The voices pause inside, then Wilson calls "Come on in."

She opens the door -- and there's Steve, awake, upright, his expression lighting up with surprise when she steps in.

"Nita?"

"Hi," she says, feeling oddly shy. "Can I come in?"

"Yeah," Steve says, with a bit of the same hesitancy.

Wilson looks between the two of them, then stands up, rolling his shoulders. "Y'know, stretching my legs sounds great. 'Scuse me a minute." He gives her a nod as he passes her and heads out the door, leaving her alone with Steve again.

She comes further into the room, up next to the bed; unsure what to do with her hands, she hugs her elbows. Steve pauses, then pats the mattress.

"Wanna sit down?"

Nita laughs. "Yeah." She lowers herself next to him. "How're you feeling?"

"Sore." He looks rueful. "I didn't even feel like this after I woke up the first time."

"Well, you had seventy years to heal up before you woke up that time. You've only been out" -- she checks the clock on the wall -- "fourteen hours? How long was _I_ asleep?"

"What are you doing here, anyway? Here in DC? I thought you were safe in New York."

"I wasn't exactly safe in New York," she points out. "Nat sent Clint to be my bodyguard. He said I was on some kind of Hydra hit list."

Steve's expression grows somber. "That's what Sitwell said."

"Sitwell? When? What _happened_ , Steve?"

He lets out a breath.

And then he tells her.

He tells her about Project Insight. The circumstances of Fury's death. The S.H.I.E.L.D. pursuit of him and Nat. She brings him a glass of water when his throat starts to get dry, but mostly he talks uninterrupted, laying out with a soldier's precision the events of the last three days.

The underground bunker. Armin Zola. The missile strike. Interrogating Sitwell, calling her, and--

He breaks off for a moment, which stretches to two moments. Nita blinks at him.

"What is it?"

"You know who Bucky Barnes is?"

She nods. She's seen the Smithsonian exhibit. "Your friend."

"He's alive."

Nita blinks, and asks blankly, "Huh?"

"He survived the fall we thought killed him. Hydra got their hands on him, and--"

He breaks off, one hand clenching into a fist. Nita waits it out, a feeling of dread settling into her stomach.

"They made him into an assassin," Steve finally continues. "I don't know exactly what they did to him, but they sent him after us, and he looked right at me and he didn't know me."

"They brainwashed him?"

"Maybe you could call it that." He looks down at his hands, relaxes his fists deliberately. "He killed Sitwell. We might have gotten away from him, but . . ."

He continues, even again -- but the strain is starting to show in his voice. He tells her the tac team took them into custody, rather than execute them in the street. He tells her Maria Hill showed up out of nowhere to get them out. He tells her they met with "an old friend," they planned an assault on Insight -- on S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra itself – they broke into the Triskelion and boarded the helicarriers.

They met the Winter Soldier.

Somewhere in this recitation, Nita's hand slides into Steve's, and he twines his fingers with hers and doesn't let go.

"I thought maybe I could get through to him," Steve says, low, flat, his gaze fixed on the middle distance. "If he saw me, I thought maybe he'd remember me."

"Maybe you did. He didn't kill you," Nita murmurs.

"No," Steve agrees, looking at her. "No, he didn't."

Nita squeezes his hand. "Is that the end?"

"I don't remember much after that. I must have fallen."

"Yeah. Clint and I found you on the riverbank."

He raises his eyebrows. "How?"

"Magic." She grins a little. "How else?" Her smile fades after a moment, though. "You were out cold. I did a healing spell on you. Far as I can tell you fell from one of the helicarriers and hit the water back first -- you had a lot of fractures. It would've killed most people."

"I'm tough to kill." He considers her for a moment, and Nita notes absently that even with one eye half-swollen shut he has really beautiful, solemn eyes. "I didn't really expect you to get involved."

"Because I haven't been the last couple months, you mean."

"Yeah."

"Yeah." Nita takes a deep breath. "It's over now. I can tell you now. I mean, if you want to hear it."

He squeezes her hand, and a hopeful little curl of warmth starts up in her stomach. "Of course I do."

"You remember the guy in the bar. You thought he had something on me."

Steve nods.

"It -- wasn't just a guy. It was the Lone Power."

He nods again, the quick decisive nod of someone clicking a puzzle piece into place. "Knew it."

"--What?"

"I was pretty sure." He raises his eyebrows again as she gapes at him. "I'm not dumb, Nita."

"How did -- but how'd you figure it out?"

"You told me about your Ordeal, remember? And the way you reacted to him. I've never seen you look scared except around him."

Nita . . . keeps gaping. "That's ridiculous. You have too seen me scared."

His smile is small and warm and fond. "Not really. People point guns at you and you just get annoyed."

"That's . . ." Okay, not _un_ true. "I do too get scared." For a moment, Steve's smile widens into a grin, and Nita demands, "Are you laughing at me?"

"A little."

"Shut up," she tells him, her lips quirked up in an answering smile.

He rubs his thumb over her knuckles. After a moment, though, his smile fades back into seriousness. "So he did have something on you."

"Not on me, exactly." She explains the bet as briefly as she can: the Champion and the Lone Power watching to see how humanity would resolve a conflict without outside interference. "It makes sense, you know? Give some of us all this power, this Insight thing, and see what we do with it left to our own devices. But it meant I couldn't -- I couldn't help. I didn't dare."

"Because it'd be seen as interference."

"Yeah."

"And that's why you didn't tell any of us what was wrong, either. Because it might give us an advantage, something like that."

She nods, looking down at the covers, and thinks the word _collaborationist_ with a jolt of guilt. "That's what I was afraid of. That was part of it."

"What was the other part?" he asks, softly.

She's quiet for a long moment. Steve waits.

"I didn't want to jeopardize it," she says, at long last, "because I was pretty sure you could win. I thought you could make more of a difference here than I could jumping in." She swallows, looks up at him. "And you _did_. You and Nat and, and Sam Wilson. You proved It wrong about humanity. You took down Insight, you got all this information out into the world -- just a bunch of humans left to their own devices, no help from me or any other representative of the Powers, and you still did the right thing."

"That's what I try for." No self-deprecation there: he says it in complete earnestness.

Nita -- not one to use powerful words lightly, not even in her head -- thinks she might love him more right then than she ever has.

"Steve?"

"Yeah?"

"Can I kiss you?"

He blinks at her, and then breaks into a surprised smile. "Yeah?"

"Are you sure?" she asks, anxious. "I mean, I know the way we left things -- I mean, I'd get it if you didn't feel . . ."

"Nita." He lifts their joined hands, clasps his other hand around hers, and lifts them to his mouth to kiss her knuckles lightly -- an old-fashioned gesture even for him. "It's okay."

"Are you sure?"

" _Nita_ ," he says, laughing, and reaches up to cup her cheek, and she leans in to kiss him as gently as she can, mindful of his injuries.

For the first time in months, she feels light.


	19. whose name is Afterwards

It's not that simple, of course. It never is. Life, by definition, is complex; that's sort of the point.

There will be explanations that have to be made. Having told the whole story to Steve, finally, and having all the pieces put together at last, Nita finds that she wants to tell everyone, wants to get everything off her chest, like a broken piggy bank spilling silver dollars across the floor. There will be a long evening in Tom and Carl's kitchen where she asks over and over if she did the right thing, if she read the situation correctly, if she could have done something differently and headed off the destruction of the Triskelion; and they'll say, over and over, that some things you don't get to know the answers to in this lifetime, that sometimes standing back is right and sometimes it's not, that every action has consequences both good and bad, and this time the scales tipped to good.

There will be times when she'll feel a gap, sometimes, between her and Steve, no larger than a breath. Nothing insurmountable -- just the sort of crack in trust that can't help but appear after secrets are kept. There'll be time to mend it. When she holds out a hand, Steve knows she won't let him fall, and that's a good place to start from.

There will be uncomfortable revelations about S.H.I.E.L.D. There'll be actions they took that Nita will feel compelled to try to undo, or at least to make reparations for. She was on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s payroll at the time and she feels, in some part, responsible. There will be times where she'll find, to her confusion, that she mourns Rumlow and Sitwell, and other times where she can't feel anything but anger and wish that she'd had a chance to punch both of them personally, entropy be damned.

There will be times she sees politicians on the TV -- sees the president -- and the gap in trust she feels towards them will be much larger than a breath. The sense of personal betrayal will come as a shock the first few times. Then she'll get used to it.

There will be a night she and Kit and Ronan get roaring drunk and Ronan will rip her up one side and down the other about not _calling_ them and _smashing her fecking phone_ and pulling the same _shite_ with a dying Captain America she did with him, but she's not a _kid_ anymore, she can't just _bully_ people back to life like she used to no matter how perfect their teeth are and Kit and Nita will both start laughing uncontrollably about how what Ronan noticed about Captain America was his teeth while Nita tries in vain to explain that how she healed Steve wasn't like what she did with Ronan at _all_ , it wasn't like that at _all_.

There will be the Winter Soldier -- Bucky Barnes, another man out of time -- to deal with. Somehow. Somewhere.

There will be a lot of things to do, after this is done. But that will be then. This is now.

 

* * *

It's a narrow hospital bed, but Steve makes room for her. When he starts to scoot over, Nita protests that she probably ought to leave him alone to rest. Given that she's still holding his hand as she does, though, she's not very convincing. And it seems sort of inevitable, somehow, falling asleep next to him.

"I can't remember the last time I shared a bed with someone," she murmurs, settling their joined hands on his stomach.

"Used to share with Bucky when we were kids." Steve's voice is slow and slightly slurry with sleep. "That was a long time ago."

Nita closes her eyes and rests her lips against his shoulder, unsure what to say. "Sure you don't mind me staying?"

"Yeah." He shifts, and she feels his cheek against her hair. "Don't go."

She wonders what Wilson is going to think if he comes back to this, and then she's asleep.

 

* * *

She's walking down a street lined with brownstones and shops, an urban neighborhood. It's one of those long summer evenings, where the sun will be setting for hours, lengthening shadows and painting everything rose gold. The light seems to infuse their surroundings.

_Streets paved with gold_ , she says to her companion, amused. _Are we on Broadway?_

_No, Brooklyn_ , he says. He sounds bemused. _I'd know it anywhere._

She turns to look at him. He's just exactly her height, a fraction over 5'5", fair-haired and skinny. The lines of his face are sharp, but not gaunt, and his shoulders aren't broad but they're straight. The thinness of his face makes his ears stick out a little, charmingly. He swallows as they look at each other, his Adam's apple bobbing.

Steve Rogers. Not the 98-pound 4F reject or the star-spangled man you see in the old newsreels and museum exhibits. Steve as he might have been, without entropy or science fighting to make him something else -- Steve if he had been allowed to live and grow well in his own way.

_Nita?_

She grins at him. _Hi._

_Am I dreaming?_

_Kind of._

He raises his eyebrows. _Are_ you _dreaming?_

_Kind of?_ She looks around. _I haven't been here in years._

It's the kind of thought that, when awake, when elsewhere, she would have with a pang of nostalgia. If she were awake, she'd shake her head over how little wonder her dreaming self is feeling -- but the nature of Timeheart is wonder. When a feeling is so all-encompassing, why remark on it? You might as well remark on gravity.

_So we're both dreaming._

_Kind of_ , she says a third time, and holds out a hand to him.  _Wanna walk?_

_Sure_ , he says, still bemused, and puts his hand in hers. His knuckles are knobby, but his grip is strong. _Dexterous_ seems like the right word.

They walk in silence together for who knows how long. The sun warms their backs, sending their shadows out before them -- larger-than-life versions of themselves, hand in hand. Occasionally they pass by other people, sitting on stoops or conversing on corners. Sometimes they wave.

_Anyone you know?_ Nita asks, when Steve raises his free hand to a laughing pair of men, one tall and thin, the other small and dark.

_Maybe in another life_. He glances at her. _Is this Heaven?_

_Something like that_ , Nita says with a shrug. _The universe next door. The_ real _Brooklyn. All of those at once._

_But we're not dead._

_No. Just visiting._

_Huh_. Nita gives him a curious sidelong look. His lips -- still full, even with the thinness of the rest of his face -- are quirked up in a faint smile. _Who would've thought._

_Thought what?_

_That they'd have Brooklyn in Heaven._

_I don't think I'd want to go to a Heaven without New York_ , Nita says.

Steve's smile widens into a grin, and he squeezes her hand, and doesn't say anything.

They keep walking, and they come to a river that's not quite the East River, not quite the Potomac. Nita recognizes it from her dream, even without the moon floating in its waters. It looks almost molten in the last of the sunlight.

She keeps an eye out for fins, or for sleek many-legged shapes gamboling along the shore, but she doesn't think she'll see her friends in the water this time. The skyline across the river isn't quite her New York. It's missing many of the buildings she knows: a skyline a little lower, a little less mirrored. Steve's New York.

They stop on the edge of the water and gaze at it for a long time.

_Steve?_

_Yeah?_

_I'm sorry I never told you what was going on. Maybe I should've. You've always been honest with me._

He puts his head in one side and smiles at her. _Okay. Apology accepted._

_That's it?_

_You were trying to do the right thing. And you won't lie to me, will you?_

_Never._

He leans closer and loops an arm around her waist. _Then that's it._

Nita laughs. _Oh, that's it. Okay. Cool._

_Swell_ , Steve agrees, with a smirk, and they watch the setting sun turn New York into a city of fire.

Did _I do right?_ Nita asks the city, the river, the dusk, and the answer comes back to them as it always has: _Well, go find out._

 


	20. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You knew to stay through the credits, right?

"Nita," says Travis, the instant she comes through the front door, "I like your friends, okay, they're nice and all and they're great at opening jars, but you have _got_ to give me some warning before you give them keys to the apartment."

"I haven't given anyone keys to the apart--"

"Hey, Nita."

Nita turns and stares. Natasha, her hair cut to a short, unfamiliar pixie, leans against the door frame of Nita's bedroom and smiles.

"How's your schedule looking these days?"

"Well," Nita says, "my job kind of went up in flames."

Natasha's smile turns into a grin. "Mine too. Wanna help me look for a new one?"

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is, BY FAR, the longest fic I have ever written, and I could not have done it without the unflagging support and excitement from all y'all who have been reading and commenting and writing more fic and theorizing on tumblr and all of that.
> 
> Particular shout-outs have to go to mercuria, batyatoon, and newredshoes for frequently helping me hammer out plot details and cheerleading. But really, all of you who have been reading along -- thank you. I had so much fun writing this and I'm so glad you came along for the ride.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Chocolate Kisses and Potshots at Gods](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1588721) by [AtypicalOwl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AtypicalOwl/pseuds/AtypicalOwl)
  * [Identities](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3368744) by [the_afterlight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_afterlight/pseuds/the_afterlight)
  * [And the Moon Is No Dream](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6028957) by [littleskywatcher](https://archiveofourown.org/users/littleskywatcher/pseuds/littleskywatcher)




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